Death
Patarkatsishvili, aged 52, collapsed at Downside Manor, his mansion in Leatherhead, Surrey, England on February 12, 2008 at 10.45 pm. Ambulance crew members tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the businessman, who was pronounced dead at 10.52 pm. As in any other case of unexpected death, Surrey police treated the case as "suspicious" and launched an official investigation.
The businessman spent his last day in the City of London office of international law firm Debevoise and Plimpton, meeting his business partner Boris Berezovsky, his spokesperson Lord Bell and his lawyer Lord Goldsmith QC, as well as fellow exiles, the Russians Nikolai Glushkov and Yuli Dubov From the City he left for Down Street, Mayfair, to visit Berezovsky's office, and at 7.00 pm was returned to Leatherhead with his Maybach. Shortly after dining, Patarkatsishvili told his family he felt unwell and went upstairs to his bedroom where he was found unconscious after a heart attack.
Preliminary reports indicated a heart attack as the cause of death. According to the first post-mortem tests, the death of Patarkatsishvili appeared to have been from natural cardiac-related causes. According to the pathologist Ashley Fegan-Earl, he could identify a "severity that could have resulted in a sudden and unexplained collapse and death at any time." He also concluded that chest pain that Patarkatsishvili had had and a sudden collapse "were consistent with death due to coronary heart diseases." Patarkatsishvili's father Shalva Patarkatsishvili also died of a heart attack at an early age of 48. The businessman had no history of illness but was reported to have led an unhealthy lifestyle, smoking excessively and taking no exercise. According to Lord Bell, "he always looked 10 years older than he was." However, theories of a possible assassination were considered seriously by some. " number of compounds known to be used by the former KGB can induce heart failure, but leave virtually no trace. One is sodium fluoroacetate, a fine white powder derived from pesticide." The British police checked Patarkatishvili's Surrey mansion for radioactive elements but reportedly found none.
Read more about this topic: Badri Patarkatsishvili
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“He should be as vigorous as a sugar maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure,... and not like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the endeavor to heal its wounds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)
“We often see malefactors, when they are led to execution, put on resolution and a contempt of death which, in truth, is nothing else but fearing to look it in the face—so that this pretended bravery may very truly be said to do the same good office to their mind that the blindfold does to their eyes.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)