PARIS, 13 December 2004 — Poisoning has been used throughout history as a political weapon, but by its very nature, it is a secretive method of killing that is designed to keep people guessing.
In the past, poisoners sought preparations that would closely mimic the symptoms of natural illness. Like Napoleon Bonaparte, who some researchers today believe was slowly killed with small doses of arsenic, the victims just wasted away.
When Francois II of France died in 1560 of an apparent abcess in his ear, people suspected poisoning, but nothing could be proved. But then, Shakespeare picked up the idea 40 years later when he wrote Hamlet.
Modern technology has come up with ever more effective means of poisoning.
Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London in 1978 with an umbrella whose tip carried a tiny speck of ricin, a poison derived from the castor bean.
It produced a galloping fever that is difficult to distinguish from a natural disease.
Had Markov not been such a prominent opponent of Bulgaria’s then Communist regime, pathologists might never have discovered the poison, which is believed to have been developed by the Soviet secret service.
When suspicions arose that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had been poisoned, a French military spokesman, Gen. Christian Estripeau, told AFP that there were undoubtedly poisons that would require refined analysis to detect.
One French specialist, who asked not to be identified, said a totally undetectable poison is “envisageable.” He compared possible poisoning techniques with that of the increasingly subtle doping methods used in sport.
In comparison, the apparent poisoning of Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko seems crude and possibly designed to intimidate rather than kill.
The sudden appearance of a virulent acne led some experts to conclude immediately that some kind of chlorine poisoning was involved, such as that produced by exposure to dioxin. But while dioxin is known as carcinogenic and deadly, experts say it is not a fulminating agent of death.
One of European history’s most sinister professional poisoners was Locusta, who learned about herbal lore in ancient Gaul and took her skills to Rome, where she was much in demand by those who wanted to hurry along the deaths of rivals or rich relations without making it obvious. Roman Empress Agrippina called on Locusta’s services around 54 AD to get rid of her husband Claudius to make way for her son, Nero.
Locusta succeeded with the help of Claudius’s favorite dish of mushrooms. It was then widely rumored that Nero used Locusta to bump off a potential rival, Britannicus.
In his 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” Scottish writer Charles Mackay described how an “atrocious system of poisoning, by poisons so slow in their operation, as to make the victim appear, to ordinary observers, as if dying from a gradual decay of nature” had swept over Europe in the 17th century “like a pestilence.” So common was it in France that Madame de Sevigne expressed the fear that Frenchman and poisoner would become synonymous terms.”
Mackay said that in Italy, poisoning was seen as “a perfectly justifiable means of getting rid of an enemy” and that Pope Alexander VII was shocked to learn “that great numbers of young women had vowed in the confessional that they had poisoned their husbands with slow poisons.”
The favorite method, it seems, was a tasteless, colorless and odorless concoction called Aqua Tophania, which was based on arsenic. Even in that unscrupulous age, however, some had scruples about poisoning.
King Henry VII of England decreed that poisoners should be boiled alive.
And that most Machiavellian of princes, Cosimo de’ Medici, turned down an offer to assassinate his enemy Piero Strozzi “since we find such matters excessively horrid.”
But if someone else wanted to commit the deed, Cosimo hinted, “he might find that Apollonius (of Citium) gives some recipes.”
