to mysterious numbers stations to outright brazen assassination.

If you annoy a Russian political leader enough, you have a decent chance of “accidentally”

falling out a window and onto some live bullets.

You may have heard of Russian agents of death coming in forms as strange and innocuous as

a poison-tipped umbrella, but what about a simple, innocent cup of tea?

You're about to hear a story about a high-profile assassination, a deadly and mysterious poison,

and one of the most bizarre criminal investigations known to history – a man solving his own

murder before he even died.

How could a story this fantastical have possibly happened?

Let's take a look and find out.

Imagine yourself on a normal November day in London, England.

You have a decent, uneventful morning.

A simple breakfast at home, perhaps a walk outside in the crisp fall air.

You have a lunch meeting at a sushi restaurant, then, later, head over to the Millennium Hotel

for yet another meeting at the Pine Bar.

You decline the bartender's offer to order a drink – after all, you don't drink alcohol

– and sit down to speak with the two men you have arranged to meet.

They seem distracted, sullen even, but blame the behavior on a long flight into the country.

They have a pot of tea at the table when you arrive, and offer some of the remaining tea

to you.

You drink several sips, but are put off by the bitter taste and decline to finish the

cup.

The men bid you farewell, and you all go your separate ways.

Seventeen days later, you are lying in a hospital bed in severe pain.

You experienced intense diarrhea and vomiting and even lost the ability to walk without

help before you asked your wife to call you an ambulance.

The doctors have diagnosed you with thallium poisoning.

However, your symptoms do not completely align with a case of thallium poisoning.

You have damage to your bone marrow and gut that is consistent with thallium poisoning,

but lack the presence of peripheral neuropathy – pain and numbness in the fingers and feet

– a key indicator of this ailment.

The doctors are baffled by your case, and the British police are just as confused by

your condition and apparent poisoning.

Only you have an idea of what could have happened.

You believe that you have been assassinated, and you are correct.

Soon, with the help of authorities, you will solve your own murder from your hospital bed.

This is exactly what happened to Alexander Litvinenko in November of 2006, and it is

just the tip of the deadly iceberg.

Alexander Litvinenko was a former member of the Russian Federal Security Service who fled

Russia to seek political asylum in the United Kingdom, which he was granted.

He was a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, and referred to his rise to power as a “coup”,

drawing a great deal of negative attention from Putin.

He left Russia in 2000, and in 2003 he began working with MI6 as an agent and an expert

on organized crime in Russia.

He provided MI6 with intelligence about the Russian mafia presence in Spain.

This activity likely reached officials within the Russian government, who were already not

great fans of Litvinenko, and who had close ties with the Russian mafia.

In the weeks leading up to his assassination, there was a plan in place for Litvinenko to

testify before a Spanish prosecutor about the influence of the Russian mafia.

This is likely what placed a target on his back, and led to his assassination at the

hands of Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun.

They poisoned Litvinenko, not with thallium as his doctors initially thought, but with

polonium-210, a rare, deadly, nearly undetectable radioactive isotope.

Before we learn more about Alexander Litvinenko's assassination, and how he solved it, we must

discuss polonium-210 and what it does to the human body.

Polonium is one of the rarest elements in the world, rightfully referred to by Kovtun

as “a very expensive poison.”

It was first discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898.

Polonium is so toxic to the human body that a fatal dose would only need to be about the

size of a speck of dust.

That is all that it would take.

Once a person has ingested the polonium, radiation poisoning begins to set in.

Nausea, hair loss, swelling of the throat, and the breakdown of the immune system are

all symptoms of exposure to polonium.

After long enough, it causes organ failure and seeps into the bone marrow.

Eventually, it causes cardiac arrest and death.

Not only is it deadly, but polonium is very difficult to detect, making it a perfect murder

weapon.

Litvinenko's doctors only determined a correct diagnosis of polonium-210 poisoning by testing

his urine for the isotope on the day of his death.

By then, of course, it was much too late.

However, before he died, Litvinenko was able to aid in the investigation into his own murder.

Very few people get the opportunity to solve their death before it happens, but Alexander

Litvinenko was a brilliant man who understood that there were many people out there who

wanted to kill him.

He also knew that, if he had been assassinated, there were only three men that could have

done it.

He met with three men on the day that he was poisoned, and it had to be one of them.

First, he met with an Italian associate of his, Mario Scaramella, for lunch.

After lunch, he met with Lugovoi and Kovtun at the Millennium hotel.

Litvinenko described this meeting in detail to Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt of Scotland

Yard in an interview.

He was greeted by Lugovoi upon entering the Pine Bar.

Lugovoi then led him to a table that was already covered with mugs and a pot of tea.

Litvinenko did not drink alcohol, so the two men did not attempt to ply him with something

stronger than the tea on the table.

Then, Lugovoi told Litvinenko that he was leaving, and there was tea left in the pot

if he wanted to drink it.

Litvinenko poured himself some tea from the pot and drank it.

In his account, Litvinenko told Hyatt that he had only a few sips, and that the tea tasted

off to him.

He also noticed that Lugovoi did not drink any tea while sitting at the table.

They were then joined by Kovtun.

Litvinenko knew, even as he was leaving the hotel, that something was off about the meeting.

He told DI Hyatt, “Later on, when I left the hotel, I was thinking there was something

strange.

I had been feeling all the time, I knew that they wanted to kill me.”

Litvinenko made for an excellent witness, even as he lay dying in the hospital from

an as-yet-unknown poison.

He gave 18 interviews to the detectives assigned to his case, spanning a total of nearly nine

hours.

His experience with investigations gave him a great memory, and he pointed the detectives

in the direction of Lugovoi and Kovtun.

He gave the police his email, his bank account, and a full account of his history with the

Russian Federal Security service, as well as explaining why these men might want him

dead.

With his help, the police began to piece together a clearer picture of what happened to Alexander

Litvinenko on November 1, 2006, at the Millennium Hotel.

The investigation uncovered information that indicated that, contrary to what was believed,

November 1 was not the first attempted assassination of Litvinenko.

A radiation stain was found in a cup leftover from a business meeting between Lugovoi and

Litvinenko in October, but, because Litvinenko did not drink any of the liquid in this cup,

this attempt was unsuccessful.

So, the fateful Millennium Hotel meeting was set up.

Lugovoi told detectives that he arrived at the hotel for the meeting at 4 PM.

However, when CCTV footage was checked, it was revealed that he arrived at 3:32 PM, a

half hour earlier than reported.

He disappeared into the men's bathroom, then emerged.

At 3:45 PM, Kovtun arrived at the hotel and did the same.

Later tests showed a massive amount of radiation contamination in one of the bathroom stalls,

as well as under the bathroom's hand dryer.

These readings were so high that they were off the scale, indicating that Kovtun and

Lugovoi were likely preparing the polonium in the restroom somehow.

At the very least, they had polonium on their hands when they went into the restroom, and

it could not have come from anyone else at the hotel.

Litvinenko never went to the hotel bathroom while there, so he could not be the source

of the polonium contamination found inside.

When Litvinenko arrived, the pot of tea was already on the table, and his fate was already

sealed.

It is not certain which man put the polonium in the teapot, but, whoever did, the tea was

contaminated, and the few sips that Litvinenko took before giving up on the unpleasant-tasting

tea were enough to kill him.

When the forensics team investigated the Pine Bar, checking tables, cups, spoons, saucers,

teapots, and milk jugs, they found the teapot that Litvenenko was served from.

Lugovoi and Kovtun clearly didn't care if their assassination attempt put others in

harm's way, as the polonium was spread throughout the kitchen and dozens of unsuspecting people

exposed.

Polonium contamination was found in the bar's dishwasher, the floor, an ice cream scoop,

a chopping block, chairs, and the piano stool.

However, as dangerous as it is, polonium's tendency to stick around on items and provide

detectable radiation readings allowed the police to connect it back to Lugovoi and Kovtun.

The teapot that Litvinenko drank from gave off a reading of 100,000 becquerels of polonium,

and the table where the three men sat indicated radiation levels of 20,000 becquerels, or

twice the strength it would take to kill a person if ingested.

Even more damning than the evidence found in the bar, however, was the evidence found

in Kovtun's hotel room, room 382.

While the room was being investigated, the forensics team took apart the bathroom sink.

Inside, in the sink's waste pipe, they found a strange clump that tested for 390,000 becquerels

of polonium.

This clump had to have come into direct contact with the polonium itself, rather than just

traces of it.

With this information, the picture came into sharp focus.

After the meeting with Litvinenko, Kovtun went to his hotel room and dumped the rest

of the polonium down his bathroom sink, hoping to dispose of the murder weapon once and for

all.

However, in spite of this damning evidence, Kovtun and Lugovoi were already back in Russia

and out of the reach of the British justice system.

Though Lugovoi and Kovtun were directly responsible for his death, Litvinenko blamed another,

loftier figure for the decision to have him killed.

He named Putin in his final statement before his death, saying: “…this may be the time

to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price.

You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics

have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value.

You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of

civilized men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will

reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.

May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its

people.”

He also agreed to have his photograph taken as he sat in bed, bald and gaunt from radiation

poisoning, so that the world could see what was done to him for the mere act of speaking

up and speaking out.

Even as he was sick, weakened from the poison, he stared defiantly down the lens of the camera,

strong until the end.

The image circulated around the world, accompanying his story and his message.

While the British police named Kovtun and Lugovoi as prime suspects in the murder of

Litvinenko, they have not been able to extradite them from Russia.

Both men deny their involvement in Litvinenko's death, but Litvinenko's account of events,

and the evidence, speaks for itself.

Even if they are never truly brought to justice directly, Alexander Litvinenko made sure that

the world would know who killed him.

Check out “Death Row Criminal the Law Couldn't Kill - True Story” and “The Man Who Stole

$65 Billion - Largest Ponzi Scheme In History” for more wild true stories about fascinating

people!