Let's see how the gentle world of chess has been getting on...
Russia is no stranger to unique poisonings. State agents have been known to use everything from polonium-laced tea to the deadly nerve agent "novichok" when making assassination attempts against both defectors in the UK and internal political rivals like Alexei Navalny.
But a new "first" in the long history of poisonings was opened this month in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where a 40-something chess player named Amina Abakarova attempted to poison a rival by depositing liquid mercury on and around her chess board.
Malcolm Pein, the English Chess Federation's director of international chess, told the UK's Telegraph that he had “never seen anything like this before... This is the first recorded case of somebody using a toxic substance, to my knowledge, in the history of the game of chess."
Cheesy chess joke: She should just have poisoned the white b pawn.
2 comments:
Ref your cheesy chess joke: I'm guessing that the Sicilian mafia have some experience of poisoning pawns
I can't imagine it would be particularly effective as a poison in the short term. At my school on the last day of term we had to spend the day cleaning the place, and after I'd done the sweeping and suting of the physics lab. I would take up the covers from the drains that channeled the floors at attempt to remove the mercury that had accumulated in the gaps between the ceramic tiles. Over the years I accumulated a small bottle full of it. As far as I am aware it never did me any harm, but who knows? I might have been the next Einstein if I hadn't done that.
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