Exactly how Putin's hackers planted all the incriminating material on the poor man's computer and forced him to confess, is still being investigated

British media are reporting on the start of the trial of Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet-era dissident who testified in support of the case alleging Vladimir Putin's secret services were behind the death of fellow dissident Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

Bukovsky is being accused of amassing a huge collection of images of children being physically abused, according to the Guardian:

A champion of human rights The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky downloaded thousands of indecent images of children over a 15-year period, most of them featuring boys, a court has been told. Bukovsky, 73, is charged with 10 counts of making and possessing indecent photos and one count of possessing an indecent computer-generated graphic. He denies all charges. William Carter, prosecuting, told a jury at Cambridge crown court on Monday that Bukovsky’s computer was identified during an operation by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. Police arrested him in October 2014 at his home on the outskirts of Cambridge. Bukovsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976, told detectives he had indecent material, the court heard. “He [Bukovsky] responded immediately by saying he did download images and that they would be on the computer in his study,” Carter said. The police subsequently discovered “a very great deal of material” on two hard drives. It showed some “very young” children up to the ages of 12 and 13. They were “largely but by no means exclusively boys”, the court was told. There were some adults involved.

Uncanny how every criminal psychopath from Russia somehow always ends up in either London or Israel.

Bukovsky testified at the public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a close friend of Bukovsky's. The inquiry accused two Russians, Dimitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, of poisoning Litvinenko with polonium-laced tea.

The police admit they had already found the massive kiddie porn stash on Bukovsky's laptop before the inquiry, but apparently they decided that it shouldn't be used as an obstacle to his testimony against Putin:

Bukovsky told the inquiry he was “pretty sure” the Kremlin was behind Litvinenko’s death. The inquiry chairman, Sir Robert Owen, concluded in January that Vladimir Putin and his former FSB spy chief Nikolai Patrushev had “probably approved” Litvinenko’s death. Bukovsky has been a longstanding opponent of Soviet and Russian power. He began his struggle against the Soviet regime in the early 1960s. Soviet authorities eventually kicked him out of the country after he exposed the use of psychiatric treatment against political prisoners to the west. He has lived in the UK ever since.

Whatever psychiatric treatment the Soviets gave Bukovsky, it now appears their efforts were woefully inadequate.