DISINFO: UK may have poisoned Litvinenko with thallium and used polonium marker to shift blame
SUMMARY
According to the official narrative, former Russian spy Alexandr Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium. But documents compiled over 40 years ago by East German security services show a 100-percent similarity between symptoms of poisoning by polonium and those caused by thallium nitrate poisoning.
In other words, Litvinenko may have been poisoned with thallium nitrate and then contaminated with a polonium marker to cover up the traces.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative surrounding the poisoning of Russian spy-turned-whistleblower Alexandr Litvinenko.
The claim is built entirely on a non sequitur. Even assuming that four-decade-old Stasi documents comparing the toxicological effects of thallium and polonium survive to this day, this does not in any way entail that Litvinenko was poisoned with thallium in 2006.
Thallium poisoning does resemble irradiation by polonium-210, but only in its early stages. Exposure to the metal was initially one of the suspected causes of Litvinenko's illness, but this hypothesis was dismissed after tests showed non-toxic levels of thallium in the blood. Three weeks after the patient's admission, doctors conducted gamma-ray spectroscopy of his urine sample, which definitively established polonium-210 as the poisoning agent. Litvinenko died six hours later.