Gangster regime

Someone is murdering all the Russian journalists, members of parliament, and former state security officers who have been exposing the corrupt regime of KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin.

When he was Russian state security chief (after being in charge of hard currency operations in St. Petersburg), Putin personally took charge of the investigation of the gangland-style murder of crusading parliament member Galina Starovoitova. The authors of the crime were never found.

Then came the murders of journalists from Novaya Gazeta, one of the only opposition newspapers that Putin could not silence: investigative reporter Igor Domnikov, killed after being attacked on a Russian subway in 2000; editor Yuri Shchekochikhin, a specialist in corruption and the security services who was poisoned in 2003; and Anna Politkovskaya, first poisoned and finally shot to death in 2006.

Domnikov's targets were corrupt governors; his killers were found. The assassins of his two colleagues remain at large.

And now the radiation poisoning of one of the few Russian state security officers to defect to the west because of official corruption.

Putin calls the radiation poisoning of former state security officer Alexander Litvinenko a "pity" and warns that the killing not be used as a "political provocation" against him.