Has Putin found a new way to poison political opponents? - Vladimir McTavish
We live in times of short attention spans. Even some major news stories have a limited shelf-life these days. What was in the headlines will have frequently disappeared from the front pages after less than a week.
Take for the example, the scary repots from this Monday about Russia killing off people using frog poison. This appears have to been forgotten already.
To refresh the memory, at the start of the week, the BBC were repeating claims from the security services that the Moscow government had bumped off opposition leader Alexei Navalny by subjecting him to a highly toxic liquid derived from frogs native to the jungles of Ecuador.
Is it just me, or did anyone else find this story just a wee bit far-fetched? We all know Putin is beyond evil and that his counteri-ntelligence agents are totally ruthless. But they already have a range of poisons at their disposal., they don’t really need any more. So Is this further proof of their machiavellian scheming or merely British propaganda?
If it were to be a plot in a Bond movie, it would border on ridiculous. In real life, it seems even less plausible and also raises a number of unanswered questions.
First is why the Russians travelled all the way to Latin American to find these frogs. Once there, how long did it take to locate them before they were able to fly them back to Moscow?
Finally how were their boffins in some lab in the Lubyanka prison able to extract this lethal poison without risking their own lives?
Ah well. Us ordinary folk can believe this tale, dismiss it as total nonsense or endlessly speculate about what actually might have happened. It’s all good knockabout entertainment and will doubtless keep MI5 on their toes.
For all we know, they may even have sent a team to check out the amphibians in London Zoo, just to be on the safe side.
Anglers beware. You never what danger could be lurking in our ponds and canals. Trust neither Putin nor frogs!