Skip to next paragraph Marion Ettlinger Nell Freudenberger THE DISSIDENT By Nell Freudenberger.
The medieval governor had a modern incarnation in Saddam Hussein, whose lieutenants once executed a scholarly dissident by driving nails into his forehead.
A brilliant scientist -- and in his early years a loyal member of the Communist Party -- Mr. Fang had become China's best-known dissident by the 1980s, his views shaped by persecution in China and exposure to Western political concepts abroad.
Opposite him, in all likelihood, will be an ultranationalist parliamentary deputy, Andrei K. Lugovoi, who is wanted by British authorities on suspicion of killing a dissident by poisoning him with a radioactive isotope.
The crime ranks as the first independently documented assassination of a Russian dissident by the Russian state on European soil, and – another nasty first – using nuclear substances to boot.
The contacts began after he alleged in a blog that he had uncovered MI5's role in the rendition (abduction) of a British Libyan dissident by Assad's secret police.
