PO-210 by Any Other Name

My thoughts on the Litvinenko poisoning:

I'm reminded of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. This book was in the form of a medieval mystery story with a 12th-century Sherlock Holmes-equivalent solving the mysterious poisoning of several in a monastery. The key aspect to solving the case and identifying the culprit was the absence of motive, and the solution turned out to be a booby-trapped document.

Here there's plenty of motive, but identifying a potential culprit who had a physical connection with the victim seems to be the key. This latest poisoning of a second person, one who met with Litvinenko, suggests that there may have been such a trap: a document which may not have been so important in its contents, but was designed to draw interest and then kill those who viewed it. A ultranationalist Russian might have developed such a poisoned piece thinking that those who viewed it--"it" being some scurrilous piece of anti-Russian gossip, probably made up--deserved to die.

All we need is the smoking (in the alpha-ray sense) document.