> from russia with blood the assassination in the sleepiest recessies of the home counties was a mystery that remained unsolved and perplexed the villagers of furneux pellham for almost a decade. no one could understand who could possibly have had a motive to murder the elderly veteran. but as hertfordshire police struggled to make sense of the crime, they made a connection. lieutenant colonel workman shared his surname with a man who made a much more likely target: the extradition judge who had recently enraged the kremlin by refusing to send berezovsky and zakayev back to moscow. judge workman, who lived in the nearby home county of berkshire, was warned by detectives that he might have been the intended victim of the hit. when berezovsky heard of the killing, he was certain that the kremlin had made a bungled attempt to exact its revenge on the judge who had granted him and zakayev safe haven in britain. after all, members of the judiciary in russia who refused to bend to putin's will might very well find themselves on the wring end of a sawed-off shotgun: that was how the president had his enemies convicted of spurious crimes with such ease. if this was a state-sponsored hit, it clearly wasn't a sophisticated one, but perhaps some local hoodlum had been hired for the job and got his wires crossed. ''close connection between the fsb and the russian organized crime is a fact,'' the ex-kgb man shvets had written in his expert statement in support of berezovsky's asylum application. ''a low-level fsb officer can instruct a professional criminal to kill anybody in the uk, and it will be done without a paper trail.''
Norway