[...] Chairman of the Italian inquiry is Senator Paolo Guzzanti, who is also a member of recently deposed Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. The allegation against Prodi came just before the Italian general election this year when Berlusconi was ousted, so we might put it down to one of the pre-election dirty tricks for which Berlusconi was famous. Scaramella claims that his work involved a lot of Soviet issues - the dumping of radioactive waste, and that it was for this reason that he was asked to submit testimony to the inquiry.

Uranium to make atom bomb sold to four Italians

BBC International Monitoring/Corriere della Sera
June 12, 2005/June 11, 2005

Rome: "During the month of September 2004 I was approached by an Ukrainian national, whom I know by the name of Sasha, who wanted to sell me a briefcase containing radioactive material, and, more precisely, uranium for military use." There is enough testimony by Giovanni Guidi, a Rimini businessman, and by other defendants - Giorgio Gregoretti, Elmo Olivieri and Giuseppe Genghini - to fuel a spy story worthy of a novel by Le Carre. Involved is a briefcase containing five kilos of highly enriched uranium, half of which would be enough to build an atomic device, which remained for months in a Rimini garage. A briefcase, however, which eluded investigators, and which managed to get back into the hands of the Ukrainian national, who perhaps is still in Italy. Together with another briefcase having a similar content, and a third believed to conceal a tracking system. The entire kit geared to the assembly of a small tactical atomic bomb.

A mystery story fueled by information supplied the Rimini police department by a consultant of the Mitrokhin committee, Mario Scaramella, who, acting on behalf of the agency presided over by Paolo Guzzanti, was trying to track illegal funds from the former USSR that had transited through [the Republic of ] San Marino. The two defendants' defence attorney warns that this "could be the trial of the century, but also the century's biggest hoax". The mystery, however, continues, and emerges from the testimony of the defendants, who were questioned Wednesday [8 June] night and all day Thursday, and subsequently released with the charge of possession of war weapons.

The uranium was allegedly contained in a hermetically sealed, black, leather briefcase, along with a photo illustrating its content. Five uranium bars weighing one kilo each. Sasha delivered the briefcase to Guidi. "My precarious economic situation induced me to accept," explains the 46-year-old Rimini businessman, who is married to a Russian woman, and runs an import-export firm that has dealings with Russia and Ukraine. Guidi in turn informed Giorgio Gregoretti, who "placed it [the briefcase] in a cardboard box, which he subsequently stored in his garage." There it remained until it was placed in the trunk of Gregoretti's car, where it was seen by Elmo Olivieri, a financial consultant. Time passes "without their finding anyone interested in the material", says Guidi, and the Ukrainian "asks for the briefcase back".

The most interesting thing about the above is not the fact that Scaramella was claiming that someone was smuggling components to make a small nuclear device out of (or perhaps through) Russia and the Ukraine, but rather that the man selling the material was known only as "Sasha". On the third page, near the bottom of yesterday's Sunday Times article on the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the following sentence appears:

"The morning after Litvinenko passed away, his father paid tribute to his son, whom he called Sasha."

The title of the Times article is "The Bastards Got Me" because that is what Litvinenko is alleged to have whispered (off the record) to a friend in his dying moments. He also added "but they won't get everybody". The "bastards got me" was a strange thing to say if Litvinenko was, as is claimed, placing the blame at the door of Putin, and it also contrasts with his alleged message for Putin which appears to address the Russian leader only.

But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beatings of wings of the angel of death.

I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like.

I think, therefore, that 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 civilised value.

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

The fact is, Litvinenko could speak only a few words of English as is evidenced by a press conference he gave shortly before being poisoned, where, after a brief greeting in strongly-accented English, he asked for his comments to be translated. We are told that the above denunciation of Putin was dictated to Berezovsky's lawyer Alexander Goldfarb, and therefore must have been translated into English by him. Did he translate and transcribe it faithfully?

Litvinenko was poisoned by Polonium 210, which is a rare radioactive metalloid that occurs in uranium ores. It was discovered by Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie in 1897 and was later named after Marie's homeland of Poland (Latin: Polonia). Poland at the time was under Russian, Prussian and Austrian domination, and not recognized as an independent country. It was Marie's hope that naming the element after her home land would add notoriety to its plight. Enough polonium-210 to produce a lethal radiation dose of 10 sieverts if ingested, weighs just 0.12 millionths of a gram. Polonium 210 was used (together with Beryllium) as a trigger for early nuclear bombs. It could also be used today in the manufacture of a small tactical atomic bomb.

Polonium was used to kill Litvinenko. Was the method of his murder meant to be a subtle warning of some sort? If so, if something 'unexpected' happens, we'll know where to look.

Litvinenko claimed that the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999 in which almost 300 people were killed, and which were blamed on Chechen rebels, were in fact the work of agents of the Russian interior intelligence agency the FSB. The bombings were a classic "false flag" operation designed to demonise the Chechen rebels. Litvinenko was involved in attempting to expose this and had been digging into the war between the Kremlin and Chechen separatists, but as is often the case of honest ex-spys (John O Neill for example) did Litvinenko make the mistake of digging too deep?

In a July 2005 interview with the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Litvinenko alleged that Ayman al-Zawahiri, along with other al-Qaeda leaders, was trained by the FSB in Dagestan (a republic neighboring Chechnya) in 1998.

Given what we already suspect about who really controls Chechnyas "freedom fighters" and what we know about the reality of "al-Qaeda", did Litvinenko, in his investigations, get too close to the truth? If the event as described by the Italian Mitrokhin committee last year actually occur, was the mysterious "Sascha" Litvinenko? Did he believe that he was on a mission to entrap "Islamic" or Chechen "terrorists" and expose the FSB as a way to attack Putin? In the process of other such undercover journalistic investigations, did he discover something about the origins of "Islamic terror" or details of a plot to detonate a small nuclear device and blame it on "terrorists"?