KGB, now FSB, has long known it can act with relative impunity in western Europe. The Georgi Markov killing was open air 007 style theater. In 2004 a British lawyer named Stephen Curtis who was in the middle of a smear campaign directed against Putin went to a fiery death when a helicopter went down near Bournemouth. Curtis had received threats prior to this and even told a relative - “if anything happens, it won’t be an accident”.

They have a history of staging these executions in a public and provocative manner - probably as a warning to other dissidents that they are sufficiently ruthless to target anyone, anywhere. Not just in western Europe either. They used a car bomb in Qatr to take out then Chechnyan President in exile, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev.

The loose canon/rogue element thesis can only go so far. Most “rogue” groups of this sort don’t have the will or resources to mount an ongoing international campaign - well, unless perhaps they are being funded and motivated by a more influential party.

It all stinks to high heaven, and of course its difficult to implicate Putin directly because as a former KGB Lt Colonel he knows how these things work - wheels within wheels within wheels separating such actions from the top brass.

Putin has shown himself to be a rather strange and controlling personality, who plays up his democratic credentials to the West while engaging in some extremely questionable conduct that directly threatens human rights and freedom of speech in particular.

Before her despicable killing, Anna Politkovskaya - according to her newspaper Novaya Gazeta - was engaged in an in-depth expose of human rights abuses in Chechnya.

I wrote about these murders in my blog and I received an interesting link from a reader that dates back a few years. It’s a Time article that details some of the practices of Russian agents in the West. I’m including the link for any who might be interested …

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,18389-1610952,00.html