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FROM THE COURTIERS of Ancient Greece to Soviet spies and maybe now North Korean agents, poison has a long history as a weapon of murder, favoured by assassins for its stealthy delivery of the fatal blow.
The killing of Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of the North Korean leader, at a Malaysian airport has revived fascination in the poisoner’s methods.
In a story that could be cribbed straight from a spy novel, intelligence chiefs in South Korea say female agents dispatched by their secretive northern neighbour administered the lethal dose, with reports suggesting a toxin was sprayed in his face.
Police have already arrested four people over the killing and have said they are seeking four more male suspects from North Korea who left Malaysia on the day of the killing.
A would-be poisoner can choose from a catalogue of deadly chemicals, some of which are relatively easy to obtain.
Ricin – naturally occurring in castor oil plant seeds – and thallium (rat poison) are notorious for their murderous properties.
Arsenic delivers a slow and miserable death, while strychnine induces extreme body spasms as the victim’s respiratory system collapses.
But “cyanide is the fastest killer and the easiest to detect, its pathology appears all over the body,” said Porntip Rojanasunan a forensic expert and adviser to Thailand’s Justice Ministry.
She said the victim’s “bright red blood” in post-mortem is the telltale sign of a potential cyanide poisoning.
Other chemicals such as potassium can cause “an extreme heart arrhythmia… and can lead to a heart attack very quickly.”
Slow-acting poisons may allow assailants to slink away from the crime scene undetected.
But chemical compounds are not easy to store or handle and many carry a giveaway residue, smell or colour that makes them hard to conceal, Porntip added.
Apples, umbrellas and wine
Tales of poisonings – real or imagined – have formed their own mythology.
Poisoning has become a byword for backroom scheming by treacherous political rivals, revenge and cold-blooded murder.
Shakespeare took to the theme, with a penchant for poison-tipped endings for his characters, while Snow White’s demise after eating the poison apple became a cautionary tale on jealousy.
In real-life, academics still debate whether it is was arsenic or the asp that did for Cleopatra, toxic wine that killed Alexander the Great, or poisonous secretions in his wallpaper that accounted for Napoleon.
Anguished housewives of Victorian Britain earned notoriety for dosing the food or drink of brutish husbands with arsenic.
More recently poison featured prominently in Soviet-era tradecraft.
In 1978 Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov died after receiving a fatal dose of ricin delivered through the tip of an umbrella on a London street.
His killer has never been caught.
Moscow was accused of carrying out an assassination on British soil in 2006 when tea laced with highly-radioactive Polonium-210 was served to ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, condemning him to a slow death.
In Asia, members of a shadowy Japanese cult dropped plastic bags of liquid sarin, a nerve agent, on packed Tokyo subway trains in 1995, killing more than a dozen people.
Nine years later Indonesian rights campaigner Munir Said Thalib was killed after being poisoned on a flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam.
If Seoul’s spy chief is right, North Korea now appears to have added a new chapter to the chilling history of poison.
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Somebody being murdered is not “antics”.
I saw Coveney & Vradkar in Boots yesterday
@3monkey: lol old arsenic and lace..
I get some of those symptoms when I eat the wife’s dinners. She’s either a bad cook, or genuinely tryin’ to get rid of me.
@Paul Culligan: So you didn’t read the instructions when you purchased the goods…..
She does the shopping as well Chris, so I’m caught either way.
Joffreys death on Game of Thrones made it cool again!
Wait! Joffrey dies…., ah here… spoiler alert! Although it’s game of thrones so it’s probably more shocking if a character actually doesn’t get killed….
The borgias used to take small quantities of poison over time till the built up resistance to it. Then when they invited victims to a meal they could all eat the same food and only the guests would die
Second most deadly poison in the world is platytoxin from zoanthids, a species related to coral and anemones and which is an hazard to marine aquarium keepers, coming in on coral frags. A single gram is enough to to kill 300,000 mice, or 80 people.
Or even pure nicotine, a favourite of the assassins of the Court of Louis Roi du Soleil, who would coat their dagger blades with it, knowing that their victim need only sustain a slight nick to be killed. The deadly poison, there’s enough in a single cigarette to kill several, if it be extracted and administered direct to the blood, suppresses the respiratory system and kills within minutes.
End of the day it could have been a lot of things. “Tout est poison, rien n’est pas poison. La poison c’est la dose.” Paracelsus.
Btw smoking a cigarette doesn’t kill one (short-term) because the absorption of nicotine through the cheek cells allows the body to metabolise the tiny amounts before it kills. Not so with direct injection or administration via an open wound.
By bottle or by tongue, a joke about malicious gossip lol. But the Romans use to carry arsenic into battle incase they lost the battle as they could retreat and dump the arsenic into the wells they came across and that is where poisoning the well expression came from.
http://www.rferl.org/a/wikileaks_cables_add_to_speculation_over_litvinenko/2254821.html
The juice of gone-off prawns has been used to get rid of the occasional inconvenient husband in Asia too. Mixed in with a curry.
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