Vladimir Putin's enemies appear to have an uncanny knack when it comes to unexpectedly dying, no matter where they are.
In November 2012, a 44-year-old man died while out jogging near his Surrey home. The man was reported to have been in robust health, and police declared that the death was not suspicious.
But here are a few more facts: The jogger was a Russian banker who had fled Russia after helping expose tax fraud that implicated both the Mafia and the Russian state. Traces of a rare, poisonous flowering plant were found in his stomach.
The Brits didn't know quite what to make of it.
But a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, southwest London, was called in just last year to conduct more tests. What she found caused a sensation, says Harding: Gelsemium elegans, a lethal plant favored by Chinese and Russian assassins.
The plant grows in the Himalayas, and certainly wouldn't have found its way into the man by accident. It's somewhat reminiscent of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian security agent, who died in 2006 after drinking tea laced with the radioactive element polonium-210 at a London hotel.
It's curious how these things happen; a ricin pellet here, polonium there, Gelsemium over in the corner. Or in the case a few months ago of a former advisor to Putin who unfortunately had a falling out with him, an unexplained beating death:
Mikhail Lesin, a former Russian press minister and adviser to President Vladimir Putin, was found dead in November 2015 in a Washington, D.C., hotel. The D.C. medical examiner concluded he died from blunt force trauma.
While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, it can raise a certain degree of suspicion. Clearly, these are assassinations, which might lead one to inquire as to who might have wanted these people dead.
"The important thing to know about an assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet."
