http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/44914.html

A LEADING journalist from Russia yesterday spoke of the moment she was poisoned by mysterious forces as she tried to halt the Beslan school siege last year.
In a compelling talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Anna Politkovskaya told of how she was nearly killed during her attempt to instigate negotiations with the Chechen rebels over the crisis in North Ossetia. More than 330 people died in the siege.
Speaking through a translator, Politkovskaya, a trenchant critic of Vladimir Putin's government, described how she was flying to Rostov-on-Don when she fell unconscious.
The reporter was trying to make contact with the Chechens she knew from several years of covering the war in their homeland in an effort to open talks to halt the bloodshed at the school.
However, as Politkovskaya sipped a cup of tea she had ordered during the flight, she collapsed. Her health may be permanently damaged by the poisoning.
"I don't know exactly who tried to finish me off and I will probably never find out until the fall of the present regime," she said at the festival, which is sponsored by The Herald and the Sunday Herald.
"However, I do understand why they did it. I had realised that, with all my contacts in Chechnya, I could try and persuade Aslan Maskhadov (the deceased former leader of the Chechen rebels) to do all he could do to ensure the situation ended peacefully."
The journalist would not blame the poisoning directly on the FSB (the Russian security services) but spoke of her belief that the force benefited from the siege, and co-operated with Chechen bombings of Moscow in 1999. The bombings were used to help justify the second Chechen war.
"I ordered that cup of tea and a few minutes later I was completely knocked out," she said. "But what happened to me could not be considered a tragedy, particularly in comparison to what happened in Beslan, it was a detail in the whole affair."
She continued: "No-one has ever seriously investigated the 1999 bombings, but I am convinced that although the bombings were carried out by Chechens, they were done with the connivance of the FSB.
"There was involvement, because they were very interested in an event of that kind happening. Beslan was also very helpful to certain forces in Russia.
"It was used to the hilt by all the various security services to clamp down on the rest of society.
"And Putin used it to clamp down on the meagre democratic gains in Russia to strengthen what he calls the 'vertical ladder of power'."