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I don't remember any prominent consulate killing during the cold war as a fan of John le Carré novels. Maybe they were covered by Soviets and the West? Are the

I don't remember any prominent consulate killing during the cold war as a fan of John le Carré novels. Maybe they were covered by Soviets and the West? Are there any other examples of consular services being used to trap and punish opposition, except the Saudi Khashoggi case in Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate?

walrus01 8y ago
Not directly at a consulate, that I can recall, but having consular officials on diplomatic status in an adversary nation who are actually intelligence agency operatives was, and is, a pretty commonplace practice.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
Apparently they didn't bother to do that in a consulate. Come to think of it, Putin doesn't seem to bother with such pretenses right now. The Skripal suspects didn't even have diplomatic identities...
- praptak 8y ago
  It's the other way. The Saudis didn't bother to do that in a way that at least gives the perpetrators plausible deniability. Putin's thugs at least put some effort to cover their tracks.
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    They may have overestimated their ability to convince people he left the consulate. They may have tried to detain and abduct him. Maybe they even needed some valuable information from him and he died under torture. There are a lot of possible explanations beyond simply "they lured him to the consolate to kill him". Most of these explanations aren't a whole lot better than that, but these would explain why this all looks so chaotic or amateurish.
praptak 8y ago
They had resources to kill or kidnap their targets in a way that creates much less problems than a murder in a consulate.
- diminish 8y ago
  I rather suspect a bloody pulp-fiction-esque accident a la Tarantino at the consulate.
jpatokal 8y ago
The Dikko affair, where the Mossad working for Nigeria attempted to kidnap a dissident in London and ship him back to Nigeria in a diplomatic parcel, comes to mind. The plot fell apart, but he would almost certainly have been killed if they had succeeded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dikko_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dikko_affair
chriselles 8y ago
34 years ago Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher was murdered by shots fired from the Libyan embassy in London: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yvonne_Fletcher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yvonne_Fletcher

walrus01 8y ago

Not directly at a consulate, that I can recall, but having consular officials on diplomatic status in an adversary nation who are actually intelligence agency operatives was, and is, a pretty commonplace practice.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

Apparently they didn't bother to do that in a consulate. Come to think of it, Putin doesn't seem to bother with such pretenses right now. The Skripal suspects didn't even have diplomatic identities...

praptak 8y ago
It's the other way. The Saudis didn't bother to do that in a way that at least gives the perpetrators plausible deniability. Putin's thugs at least put some effort to cover their tracks.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  They may have overestimated their ability to convince people he left the consulate. They may have tried to detain and abduct him. Maybe they even needed some valuable information from him and he died under torture. There are a lot of possible explanations beyond simply "they lured him to the consolate to kill him". Most of these explanations aren't a whole lot better than that, but these would explain why this all looks so chaotic or amateurish.

praptak 8y ago

They had resources to kill or kidnap their targets in a way that creates much less problems than a murder in a consulate.

diminish 8y ago
I rather suspect a bloody pulp-fiction-esque accident a la Tarantino at the consulate.

jpatokal 8y ago

The Dikko affair, where the Mossad working for Nigeria attempted to kidnap a dissident in London and ship him back to Nigeria in a diplomatic parcel, comes to mind. The plot fell apart, but he would almost certainly have been killed if they had succeeded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dikko_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dikko_affair

chriselles 8y ago

34 years ago Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher was murdered by shots fired from the Libyan embassy in London: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yvonne_Fletcher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yvonne_Fletcher