The head of a private center that trains security personnel and that held a competition for Russian special forces confirmed on Tuesday that the center has used shooting targets showing the photo of Alexander Litvinenko, the former agent who was fatally poisoned in London last year.
However, Sergei Lysyuk, head of the Vityaz Center, said he had been unaware that the photo target showed Litvinenko.
"The fact that it was Litvinenko, we only found out later from the press," Lysyuk said. "We did not shoot at Litvinenko, we shot at a target."
PHOTO: AP
Use of the target became known this week after Russian media published photographs of Sergei Mironov, head of the Russian parliament's upper house, visiting the center in early November. His visit, to present awards in a competition for interior ministry special forces, came about a week after Litvinenko fell ill; one photo shows the Litvinenko target in the background behind Mironov.
Lysyuk said his company does not normally hold such contests and was granting a favor to former interior ministry colleagues, whose own training ground was being repaired.
A promotional video by Vityaz circulating on the Internet also shows trainees in camouflage fatigues shooting at a Litvinenko target, but Lysyuk said the video was made in 2002 and that the trainees were men about to enter the military.
Litvinenko, once an agent in the Federal Security Service, the Soviet KGB's main successor, fled to Britain and was granted asylum after accusing his superiors of ordering him to kill Boris Berezovsky, a Russian tycoon and one-time Kremlin insider who also has been granted British citizenship.
In exile, he became a vocal opponent of President Vladimir Putin, accusing him in a deathbed statement of masterminding his death.
Dmitry Peskov, a senior Kremlin spokesman, said using a person's face as a shooting range "was ethically incorrect," but stressed it was the company's responsibility and insisted government troops were not involved in the exercises.
Also on Tuesday, two key figures in Litvinenko investigation said in a TV interview that they would consider going to Britain if requested to by investigators.
Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun met with Litvinenko in London on Nov. 1, hours before he said he fell ill; Litvinenko died on Nov. 23 and doctors said he had been poisoned with a rare radioactive isotope.
Kovtun and Lugovoi were questioned in Moscow in interrogations observed by Scotland Yard investigators last month, and recent British media reports have claimed Lugovoi is seen as the prime suspect.
Lugovoi, in an interview with the government-funded satellite channel Russia Today, said the British reports were lies.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS