In February, when 52-year-old Georgian billionaire and political exile Badri Patarkatsishvili died at his Surrey mansion, British media wondered if this might be a Georgian version of the Litvinenko affair.  Patarkatsishvili had been a supporter of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s 2003 “Rose Revolution” but had lately been in opposition to the Georgian president, running against him in January’s presidential elections, which were called by Saakashvili after months of political turmoil and the imposition of emergency rule.  Patarkatsishvili had fled the country after Tbilisi aired a recording of him allegedly offering a Georgian security official $100 million to support the opposition.  Accused of planning a coup and “terrorist acts” against Georgian officials, Badri left for Britain.

Patarkatsishvili had claimed his enemies were planning his assassination, at one point commenting that even his 120-man security contingent wouldn’t be enough to stop them.  To back up his claims, Badri released an audiotape allegedly of a conversation between a Georgian interior-ministry official and Chechen gangster Uvais Akhmadov, a member of a group notorious for kidnapping and contract murders.  (Akhmadov and his gang are widely believed to be behind the kidnapping and murder of three British engineers and one New Zealander, whose severed heads were found on a Chechen roadside in 1998.)  The Georgian official is heard asking Akhmadov to make Patarkatsishvili “completely disappear.”

A preliminary examination of the body indicated that Patarkatsishvili had died of a heart attack, and Badri had been complaining of chest pains before his demise.  Nevertheless, foul play cannot be ruled out at this stage.  According to press accounts, toxicology testing may take ten weeks to bear results, and the memory of the radioactive poisoning of Russian exile Aleksandr Litvinenko still lingers.  Badri was a longtime business partner of Litvinenko’s patron, fallen oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and his friendship with one of the Russians accused in Litvinenko’s assassination, Andrei Lugovoy, has only increased suspicions of homicide.

As is usual in the shadowy politics of the former Soviet Union, claims of plots and counterplots are being made in Georgia, Russia, and Britain.  Was Badri assassinated by the Saakashvili regime, taken down by an as-yet-undetected poison?  Many of Patarkatsishvili’s friends and supporters think so, and the political opposition in Georgia is playing up the assassination story to discredit Saakashvili.  Meanwhile, in Russia, the expected claims that Berezovsky did it have already been voiced by journalist and Duma Deputy Aleksandr Khinshteyn, widely believed to be a mouthpiece for one of the “special services” clans in Putin’s entourage.  According to Khin­shteyn’s story, Badri had fallen out with Berezovsky and was counting on Russian support against Saakashvili, who is seen in Russia as a puppet of Washington.  By courting the support of the Putin Kremlin, Badri had betrayed his old friend Berezovsky.  Khin­shteyn’s claims are lent some support by rumors circulating earlier of a Berezovsky-Patarkatsishvili rift.

Patarkatsishvili’s friendship with Lugovoy has only increased suspicions of foul play.  According to sources in London, Badri had recently been in touch with Lugovoy, and Lugovoy had visited with Badri, leaving traces of polonium behind, during his fateful trip to London in October 2006, when he met with Litvinenko and allegedly poisoned him.

The assassination of Litvinenko and now Patarkatsishvili’s death represent only the tip of an iceberg of intrigues being conducted on British soil.  Britain has become a preferred haven for political exiles, oligarchs, and other refugees from the Soviet Union.  One can only wonder how long the British people, having imported more than enough trouble from the Islamic world and straitjacketed now by restrictions on free speech that appear to be the inevitable results of “diversity,” will stand for this.  London is now Londonistan or Moscow-on-the-Thames, and Merry Old England is quickly becoming a distant memory.