OUTSTANDING CASES OF POLITICAL POISONINGS IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY FIRST CENTURIES:

1.     Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin

When a group of Russian nobles decided to get rid of the mystic Grigori Rasputin, they thought they were ridding the Russian tsarina of the influence of the “Mad Monk” whose calming effect on the Czar’s sick heir Alexei had been extended into political affairs that were putting the Russian Empire in danger. When these conspirators lured Rasputin to Prince Felix Yusupov's Moika Palace and served him food and wine laced with large doses of cyanide, they thought he would kick the bucket in no time. However, it is alleged that Rasputin didn’t die from the poison strong enough to kill 10 men. So, Yusupov shot him in the back.  But Rasputin did not die and tried to strangle Yusupov when he came close to check on the body. Yusupov was saved by the other nobles who shot Rasputin three more times, until he fell to the ground. That that was not all about the Siberian monk. In his attempts to get up again, the conspirators finished him off with clubs before wrapping him in a blanket which thy bundled off into the half frozen Neva River. When the St Petersburg authorities recovered the body three days later and did an autopsy on it, drowning was pronounced as the cause of death.

2.     Félix-Roland Moumié

Dr. Felix-Roland Moumie was the head of the UPC (Union of the Populations of the Cameroons), a political party advocating the reunification of French Cameroun and British Cameroons, Trust Territories from the former German Kamerun whose independence the UPC demanded under the auspices of the United Nations. He was the successor of the party’s first leader, Ruben Um Nyobe, massacred by French forces in September 1958; two years after the French banned the UPC, a party that enjoyed the overwhelming support of Cameroonians. Dr. Felix-Roland Moumie, the exiled leader of the Cameroonian nationalist movement, was in Europe visiting in October 1960, when William Bechtel invited him to dinner in a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, posing as a journalist.  In reality, he was a member of the "Main Rouge," an offshoot of a special unit in the French secret service charged with killing anti-French and pro-independent African nationalists and their supporters in Europe. Distracted by a summon to the phone by a restaurant staff, Moumie left his unfinished drink  that Bechtel  contaminated by pouring  a lethal does of thallium into it.  But Moumie did not drink it upon his return. So Bechtel created another distraction, during which he poured another dose of thallium into Moumie's wine. Moumie ended up gulping both drinks and died in a Geneva hospital on Nov. 3, 1960, days before his return to Guinea, and much earlier than his killers had planned. Taking an overdose of the poison thwarted the plot of blaming his death on Guinean president Sekou Toure, who was hosting Moumie in the Guinean capital of Conakry.

Fifty years after, Cameroon is still in the control of the anti-UPC forces and has never experienced rule under a head of state that is the choice of the people.  The mafia continues. The country that embodies Africa's daring spirit is still in the grips of those who betrayed its noble intentions and spat on its dream.

…To be continued

Janvier Tchouteu-Chando

ICONS AND VILLAINS: Recent Political Assassinations That Transformed Countries, Regions and the World

by Janvier T. Chando ,