I know, it was Col. Mustard in the dining room with the lead pipe!

From The New York Times:

MOSCOW, May 31 — The suspect in the fatal poisoning of Alexander V. Litvinenko, the former K.G.B. officer and Kremlin critic who died last year in Britain, said Thursday that Britain’s foreign intelligence agency and a self-exiled Russian tycoon had organized the killing and framed him to create a political scandal.

The suspect, the Russian businessman Andrei K. Lugovoi, also contended that British intelligence officers had tried to recruit him to collect compromising material about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“The poisoning of Litvinenko could not have been but under the control of the British special service,” Mr. Lugovoi said at a packed news conference here, during which he gave sensational but unverifiable descriptions of the supposed actions of spies and their agents among Russians living in London.

He said he had evidence supporting “this dark political story in which British special services play the main role.” He refused to disclose it, saying he would provide his information only to the Russian government.

The British government and Boris A. Berezovsky, the tycoon, promptly denied plotting the killing. “This is a criminal not an intelligence matter,” said a British official who spoke on condition of anonymity under civil service rules. Mr. Berezovsky, a bitter enemy of Mr. Putin, described Mr. Lugovoi’s appearance as a publicity stunt organized by the Kremlin.

The conflicting allegations exploited and underscored the deepening suspicions between Russia and the West, even as they brought new twists to a case that has fascinated the public on each side of the old cold war divide. They also elevated the case to a new level of public theater, combining elements of a bungled espionage thriller with claims of innocence reminiscent of the O. J. Simpson case.

One of the more amusing things about the old Soviet Union was the way in which a Communist Party or Red Army or KGB or Soviet Academy of Science spokesman would come out and issue statements so weird, bizarre and obviously untrue that that they could only be believed by an American college campus Marxist.

Of course this was not limited to the USSR. Remember the Red Chinese general who appeared before the international press after the Tiananmen Square massacre (images of which went out to the world in real time via satellite TV) and kept repeating, "It never happened, it never happened"?

Well, since Russia isn't going to become either a free or prosperous country and is going to continue to be an adversary to the United States I'm at least glad to see that they will retain some of their entertainment value.

The only downside is that Rosie isn't on The View any more. It would have been nice to hear her expand Lugovio's conspiracy theories to create a role for George W Bush and Dick Cheney.

Oh well, one can't have everything.