Knowledge is usually a good thing, but in the cases of some people, their knowledge turned into something pretty deadly and cost them their lives.
Alexander Litvinenko
A poisoned cup of tea sounds like something from a spy novel, but that’s exactly how Alexander Litvinenko was killed. He was a former Russian intelligence officer who’d accused Russia’s Federal Security Service of crimes and told British authorities about organized crime.
He met two men at London’s Millennium Hotel on November 1, 2006. Litvinenko drank a cup of tea that contained a radioactive chemical and became seriously ill, before dying three weeks later. A British inquiry found that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aide, Nikolai Patrushev, had probably ordered the killing.
Daphne Caruana Galizia
Daphne Caruana Galizia was someone who refused to work quietly in the background. She named names and followed the money so she could reveal the truth about suspected corruption in Malta.
She drove away from her home near Bidnija, Malta, on October 16, 2017, and a few minutes after leaving, a bomb under the driver’s seat exploded. Several people have been accused of her murder, including businessman Yorgen Fenech. He owned one of the companies she was investigating, called 17 Black.
Ján Kuciak
27 years old. That’s how old Ján Kuciak was when he died, and he was working from home at the time. Gunmen entered Kuciak’s home to shoot him and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, on February 21, 2018, in Veľká Mača, Slovakia.
It’s all because Kuciak had been reporting on tax fraud and government corruption. He’d been looking into businessmen with political connections, too. Prosecutors claim that businessman Marian Kočner arranged the hit, while Tomáš Szabó and Miroslav Marček carried it out.
Veronica Guerin
1996 had already been a difficult year for The Sunday Independent reporter Veronica Guerin. She’d already been shot and beaten, as well as threatened, to stop digging into Ireland’s drug trade. She was told to stop looking into the fortunes of major crime figures. But Guerin refused.
She stopped at a traffic light outside Dublin on June 26 of that same year. Then, two men pulled up beside her car on a motorcycle and opened fire in broad daylight. Brian Meehan was later convicted of her murder, with prosecutors saying gang members had arranged the killing to end her reporting.
Javier Valdez Cárdenas
Javier Valdez Cárdenas, a reporter, was well aware of how the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico worked. Yes, he was pretty familiar with its fractures and rivalries, along with the families and the people trapped around it. But he knew too much. He left the Ríodoce offices in Culiacán, Mexico, on May 15, 2017.
Cárdenas was forced out of his vehicle before gunmen shot him repeatedly. Mexican prosecutors claim that Dámaso López Serrano, an important member of the cartel, ordered his killing because Valdez was reporting on a cartel power struggle.
Georgy Gongadze
It started with a disappearance. Journalist Georgy Gongadze vanished on September 16, 2000, after leaving a colleague’s apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine. He never made it home. Instead, his headless body was later discovered outside the Ukrainian capital.
Gongadze ran Ukrainska Pravda, where he published stories about corruption and favoritism around President Leonid Kuchma’s government. Four Interior Ministry officers were convicted of Gongadze’s abduction and killing, along with a former police general, Oleksiy Pukach. He claimed he’d been given orders from Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko to strangle Gongadze.
Lasantha Wickrematunge
Lasantha Wickrematunge knew that his work made him enemies. He was writing about military spending and government corruption in Sri Lanka, after all, but he probably didn’t realize how bad things would get. Motorcycle riders surrounded his car near Colombo on January 8, 2009.
He was attacked inside the vehicle and died later that day. An investigation found that the evidence pointed toward a military intelligence squad operating under the Defense Ministry. Nobody has ever been convicted of arranging his murder, unfortunately.
Anna Politkovskaya
Anna Politkovskaya spent four years reporting on disappearances and kidnappings in Russia, along with cases of torture and civilian deaths during the Chechen wars. That reporting stopped on October 7, 2006. She was shot dead in her Moscow apartment.
Five men were convicted for taking part in her murder, yet the person who’d ordered or paid for her assassination has never been established. The European Court of Human Rights also concluded that the Russian government had failed to properly investigate the killing.
Miroslava Breach Velducea
The morning of March 23, 2017, began ordinarily for Miroslava Breach Velducea, as she was about to drive her son to school. But then a gunman opened fire outside her Chihuahua City, Mexico, home. He shot her eight times.
It’s because Breach had been reporting on the Salazar crime group and on political corruption. We know this for a fact because the murderer left a message at the scene, mentioning her work. Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa was convicted of helping arrange the killing, while former mayor Hugo Amed Schultz was sentenced to eight years for helping out.
Don Bolles
The source never appeared, so Bolles went back to his car and turned on the ignition. A bomb beneath the vehicle exploded, and while he survived the initial blast, he died 11 days later. He was killed for investigating bribery and crime networks among well-connected Arizona businessmen. John Harvey Adamson later admitted that he’d placed the bomb.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
13 celebrities who got away with serious crimes
Being famous seems to come with its own set of rules and that’s especially in terms of the law. Some celebrities have been involved in some pretty serious crimes but somehow dodged the full consequences that most of us might face.
