The Russian HIT LIST of Five

Evgueni Limarev is credited with e-mailing the Russian HIT LIST to Mario Scaramella. There are five potential targets identified in the e-mail. They are (listed alphabetically): Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Bukovsky, Paolo Guzzanti, Alexander Litvinenko, and Mario Scaramella. Here are their photographs and links to biographical resources.


Boris Berezovsky Born-1946, Moscow Russia,
A mathematician and computer programmer by training, in 1989, Berezovsky left the world of academia to start a business, becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the period, his interests including auto industry, oil, aluminium, and mass media. During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Berezovsky was one of the so-called oligarchs who gained access to the president, becoming a close member of Yeltsin’s inner-circle, unofficially known as the “Family”. He used this influence to acquire stakes in state companies including the car giant AutoVAZ, state airline Aeroflot, and several oil properties that he organized into Sibneft.

After, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in 2000 that Russia would no longer tolerate ’’shady groups’’ that divert money abroad, establish their own ’’dubious’’ security services, and block the development of a liberal market economy, Berezovsky voiced his plans to create an opposition party led by regional governors and other influential figures threatened by Putin’s drive for power. Berezovsky left Russia at the end of 2000 and he received political asylum in the United Kingdom.

Vladimir Bukovsky Born-1942 is a former Soviet dissident, author and human rights activist. He was one of the first to expose the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the USSR. He spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and in psikhushkas, forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals used by the regime as special prisons. The fate of Bukovsky and other political prisoners in the USSR, repeatedly brought to attention by Western human rights groups and diplomats, was a cause of embarrassment and irritation for the Soviet authorities. In December of 1976, while imprisoned, Bukovsky was exchanged for former Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan. Since then, Bukovsky has lived in the UK, focusing on neurophysiology and writing.

Paolo Guzzanti Born-1940, Rome. Member of the Italian Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. The president of the Mitrokhin commission (a parliamentary comission which was entrusted of investigations about the role of KGB in Italy), Guzzanti, is a Forza Italia senator and as a journalist, has long held a senior position at Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family, which has been running the KGB-Italian left story for months. In April 2006, Italian papers published what were reported to be transcripts of conversations between Guzzanti and Mario Scaramella. The transcripts allegedly show the two men discussing how Scaramella is to acquire strong enough evidence from Moscow to label Romano Prodi, then the leader of Italy's centre-left opposition, now Prime Minister, a tool of the Russians. Other members of the Prodi government were also said to have been targeted, including the head of the Green Party, Alfonso Scanio, who is now environment minister.

Alexander Litvinenko Born 1962, Voronezh Russia, was a lieutenant-colonel in the FSB (Russia’s Security Service) and later a Russian dissident and writer, who was murdered in London by becoming a victim of lethal polonium-210 radiation poisoning. After working for the KGB and its successor, the FSB, Litvinenko publicly accused his superiors of ordering the assassination of Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky. He alleged that al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB in Dagestan in the years before the 9/11 attacks. He wrote Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, in which he said that it was FSB agents and not Chechen rebels who carried out the apartment block bombings. He was arrested, released then fled to the UK, where he was granted political asylum and citizenship. Litvinenko is thought to have been close to journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead last month in Moscow, and said recently that he was investigating her murder. Litvinenko died November 21, 2006.


Mario Scaramella Born-1970, Naples Italy, is an Italian lawyer, academic, and security consultant. He served as an investigator and adviser to the controversial Mitrokhin Cimmission set up by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in order to investigate supposed links between Berlusconi's political rivals, including his rival for the premiership (now Prime Minister) Romano Prodi and the KGB. Scaramella is alleged to have collaborated with the president of the commission Paolo Guzzanti in garnering false evidence to link Prodi with the KGB.
The Italian self-styled security consultant says he flew to London last month to warn Alexander Litvinenko that both their lives were at risk. At a meeting at a West End sushi restaurant he claimed he gave the Russian a document which named five people on a hit list allegedly drawn up by Russian intelligence officers. Curiously, Scaramella reportedly was meeting with Litvinenko at a London sushi restaurant to tell the former KGB agent that his name was on an assassination list that he'd uncovered. Revelations that Scaramella, a shadowy nuclear security expert and well-known information peddler, tested positive Friday for the same radioactive toxin that killed Litvinenko, gives the evolving spy mystery yet another weird twist: The Italian Connection.

Photographs 3 of 4

Here are photographs of names that keep coming up in the investigation of Alexander Litvinenko's murder, or victims of previous poisonings and suspicious deaths. To read the biographies of these individuals, click on their names.

Vladimir Bukovsky Born-1942, Russia. A notable former Soviet dissident, author and a human rights activist. He was one of the first to expose the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the USSR. He spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and in psikhushkas, forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals used by the regime as special prisons. Together with a fellow inmate in Vladimir prison, psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, Bukovsky coauthored A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents , to help other dissidents to fight the authorities' abuses. In his autobiographical novel And the Wind Returns, Bukovsky describes how he was brought to Switzerland handcuffed.

Stephen Curtis Stephen Curtis, the British lawyer who was made managing director of Yukos Oil’s parent company, Group Menatep, last November, became an informant of Britain’s National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) just days before dying in a helicopter accident (March 2005). Curtis, a close confidant of jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, drew up structures for Yukos’s offshore oil trading business back in 1999 that helped the company avoid taxes. Russia’s Tax Ministry has presented Yukos with a bill of $3.5 billion for unpaid taxes in 2000 and resulting fines.

Of particular interest to investigators, following his death, were a small group of Russians who, in the 1990s, had begun to seek his services. They were among the first of a new breed of rich Russian businessmen to emerge from the sell-off of state assets under President Boris Yeltsin. In return for supporting his election campaign, they'd been given places at the front of the queue when the country's major assets were privatized. In a highly controversial deal known as "loans for shares", and a series of rigged auctions, they acquired assets worth billions of dollars at a fraction of the real price. Embracing capitalism with fervor, 22 of these businessmen quickly rose to the top, owning between them 40% of the Russian economy. The term "Russian Oligarch" was born.

Paolo Guzzanti Born-1940, Rome, he is an Italian journalist and politician. He was previously a member of the Italian Socialist Party. As a journalist he worked for L'Avanti!, La Repubblica and La Stampa. He also hosted the first season of TV show Chi l'ha visto?. Currently he is vice-director of Silvio Berlusconi's Il Giornale and editorialist for Panorama, also owned by Berlusconi. He was elected to the Italian Parliament for Forza Italia. From 2002 to 2006 he was president of the Mitrokhin Commission, a parliamentary comission which was entrusted of investigations about the role of KGB in Italy.

Lecha Ismailov A rebel field commander, Ismailov died in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison after drinking tea with two FSB officers (2002). The symptoms were similar to those that Alexander Litvinko experienced, following Polonium-210 poisoning: Ismailov’s attorney described them as he couldn’t speak or move, his skin peeled off in pieces from his head and hands, hair falling out, organ failure and internal hemorrhaging. Ismailov (the Beard) had worked closely with the warlord Ruslan (Hamzat) Gelayev. Both hailed from the same town of Komsomolskoye in southwestern Chechnya. As the leader of the "Shaykh Mansur Special Task-Force Regiment," Islamov was captured in 2000 following the siege of Grozny and was sentenced to nine years in prison for seizing hostages and organizing an armed group.

Suleyman Kerimov Born-1966,Derbent, Dagestan, Russia. He is a member of the State Duma of Russia. He is a member of the LDPR, and is Deputy Chairman of the State Duma's Committee on Sports. He has a degree in construction from the Dagestan Polytechnic Institute and in economics from Dagestan State University. Kerimov is a billionaire and known as "Russia's Richest Civil Servant", listed # 72 on Forbes' World's Richest People List. Kerimov is thought to control Nafta-Moskva, a successor to the Soviet oil trader Soyuzneftexport and SWIRU Holding AG of Luzern, and has built up his wealth investing in Gazprom and Sberbank. Nafta-Moskva owns 5% of Sberbank and 20% of BINBank. He is an enigmatic figure who claims to eschew publicity but advertizes a lavish lifestyle in the media.

Mujahedeen Khattab Born-1969, Saudi Arabia. Differing reports on how Khattab was assassinated (2000) include: dying five minutes after he opened a booby trapped letter containing a poisonous agent, given to him by a trusted aid, and secondly, that he was given poisoned food in a private party. Khattab was reported to be the most important Mujahedeen commander killed since Russian troops launched their latest campaign against the Chechen freedom struggle two and a half years ago. Khattab was an amateur movie producer, with the rather morbid habit of videotaping all of his battles.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Born -1963, Russia. He is a Russian businessman, a former Komsomol activist who became one of Russia's most powerful tycoons. He was later convicted for fraud and tax evasion and received a 9-year sentence. In 2004, it was reported that Khodorkovsky was the wealthiest man in Russia, and was the 16th wealthiest man in the world, although much of his wealth evaporated following the collapse in the value of his holding in the Russian petroleum company YUKOS. At the time of his arrest, he was considered the most powerful of the Russian business oligarchs. In 1996, he was named Chairman of the Executive Board and CEO of YUKOS Oil Company. One of his first strategic decisions, the acquisition of the Eastern Oil Company, immediately made YUKOS, Russia's second-largest oil producer. He has been recognized as a leader in the transformation of Russian business practices and is committed to the principles of good corporate governance and full transparency." Khodorkovsky Press Center

Evgueni Limarev Born-1965, admits to links with Russian intelligence agencies but denies reports that he was ever a listed KGB officer. He fled Russia in 1999 after falling out with influential politicians and businessmen in Moscow, living most recently in Cluses, France. He has denied being the sole source of the information which Mario Scaramella used as a pretext to arrange the lunch, November 1, 2006 with Alexander Litvinenko in London. “I was just one of many sources for that information,” he said. "Scaramella used me to distract attention from himself and because he was scared."


Leonid Nevzlin Born 1960, Russia. He was considered Khodorkovsky's number two man, Nevzlin took care of security issues and the group's political relations. Elected senator in the Federation Council of Russia in 2001. In 1988, as a 28-year-old computer programmer in Moscow, Nevzlin answered a newspaper advertisement for a job and met Mikhail Khodorkovsky; became a founding shareholder of what later become Group Menatep, the banking, trading and oil empire. With a warrant out for his arrest, he fled to Israel to escape the fate of his fellow Yukos shareholders, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, both of whom are in a Moscow prison awaiting trial on theft and fraud charges. He was granted citizenship in 2003. Now leading the campaign to get his partners released and funding the political opposition to President Vladimir Putin.


Roman Tsepov Born-1962, Russia, general director of the Baltik-Eskort private security firm, was poisoned (September 2004) with a large dose of medicine used for treating leukemia patients, a heavy metal that is among experimental chemicals, whose access is severely restricted. The murder resembled that of Ivan Kivelidi, the influential businessman apparently poisoned to death along with his secretary in 1995. Tsepov’s sphere of influence was very wide, from pharmaceuticals and protection service to ports, tourism, shipping, insurance, and even the mass media. Tsepov kept in touch with many siloviki, from Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev to the head of the presidential security service, Vladimir Zolotov. He was in well with deputy presidential administration chief Igor Sechin and even Vladimir Putin himself. Tsepov actively used contacts (in the UBOP, the anti-organized crime directorate) to resolve business issues and also carry out delicate errands for a number of very highly placed persons. Tsepov used his connections to lobby for the appointments of Interior Ministry and FSB (Federal Security Service) officers. It was precisely because of this that one of his nicknames within certain circles was the Producer.

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Telegraph.co.uk, December 2, 2006