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Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) -

Greek philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death after being found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth. He was made to imbibe the juice of hemlock, a poison that disrupts nerve impulses to the muscles and eventually kills victims by causing respiratory failure.

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Demosthenes (384–322 BCE) -

Greek statesman and orator Demosthenes was brave enough, or foolish enough, to organize a revolt against Macedonian king Alexander the Great. Captured by Macedonian forces and facing certain torture, he pretended he wanted to write a letter to his family. Instead he took his own life by drinking a poison liquid hidden in a reed pen.

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Cleopatra (69–30 BCE) -

Cleopatra famously died by either allowing an asp or Egyptian cobra to bite and poison her, or by using an implement to introduce the toxin by scratching. Others suggest she used a needle to inject the deadly venom.

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Claudius (10 BCE–54 CE) -

Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, the fourth Roman emperor, was poisoned by his wife, Agrippina, very likely with toxic mushrooms. She did so in order to make sure her own son (Claudius' step-son Nero) would succeed him as emperor.

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Drusus (14 BCE–23 CE) -

The son of Roman emperor Tiberius, Drusus Julius Caesar was the heir to the Roman Empire. However, Drusus died suddenly on September 14, 23 CE. Historians suggest he was dispatched by poison administered surreptitiously by his wife Livilla, who was having an affair with a Roman soldier named Sejanus, a friend and confidant of Tiberius.

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Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) -

The jury is still out on whether Pope Alexander VI was poisoned. Born into the prominent Borgia family, his corrupt rule made him one of the most infamous popes of the Renaissance. It's said that Alexander VI was accidentally poisoned to death by his son, Cesare, with cantarella, a substance similar to arsenic. But he might also have succumbed to malaria, a disease prevalent in Rome at the time.

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Grigori Rasputin (1869–1916) -

Incredibly, Russian mystic and self-proclaimed holy man Grigori Rasputin survived being poisoned with potassium cyanide, as well as being shot, bludgeoned, and being thrown into a frozen river before he finally died by drowning.

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Madge Oberholtzer (1896–1925) -

Madge Oberholtzer, a white American woman, was abducted by two members of the Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan in March 1925. Held captive, tortured, and sexually assaulted, Oberholtzer tried to take her own life by ingesting mercury chloride. Believing that she would die, her captors took her home where she recovered enough to give a signed statement to the police. A subsequent trial saw one of her attackers jailed for life. The brutal nature of the abduction so outraged most members of the Indiana Klan that entire lodges quit en masse, and membership dropped by the tens of thousands. Oberholtzer, pictured here in a snapshot by an unknown photographer, died on April 14 from infection caused by the poisoning.

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Bradford candy poisoning, 1885 -

The 1858 Bradford poisoning case was the accidental arsenic poisoning of more than 200 people after candy unwittingly made with the potentially deadly chemical was sold from a market stall in Bradford, in the northern England county of Yorkshire. Twenty-one victims died as a result of eating the sweets.

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Olive Thomas (1894–1920) -

American silent movie star Olive Thomas left this world in a fashion befitting a Hollywood film noir. On September 5, 1920, she accidentally ingested a large dose of mercury bichloride, which had been prescribed for her husband's chronic syphilis. This brought on an acute attack of nephritis. She died five days later. Incidentally, her husband Jack was the younger brother of fellow silent film star Mary Pickford.

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Erwin Rommel (1891–1944) -

Highly-respected German general Erwin Rommel was implicated in the the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Because of Rommel's status as a national hero, Hitler desired to eliminate him quietly instead of immediately executing him. To secure his reputation and knowing that his family would not be persecuted following his death, Rommel took his own life using a cyanide pill. It was later announced that he'd been killed in action.

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Eva Braun (1912–1945) -

Hitler's wife Eva Braun killed herself on April 30, 1945 by biting and swallowing a cyanide capsule. She perished in the Berlin bunker alongside the Nazi dictator, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

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Goebbels children, 1945 -

In one of the most grotesque episodes of infanticide ever recorded, Magda Goebbels, wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, killed the couple's six children with cyanide in the Berlin bunker on May 1, 1945. Later that same day, both parents took their own lives.

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Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) -

On May 23, 1945, SS chief Heinrich Himmler bit into a hidden cyanide capsule while in British custody after attempting to flee the Allies. He was dead within 15 minutes.

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Hermann Göring (1893–1946) -

Hermann Göring was awaiting the hangman's noose in Nuremberg in 1946 after being convicted of war crimes when he took his own life by ingesting cyanide hours before the sentence was to be carried out.

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Alan Turing (1912–1954) -

British mathematician and logician Alan Turing is regarded as the founder of computer science. Stationed at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime codebreaking center, he played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in many crucial engagements. Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts. He died from cyanide poisoning on June 7, 1954, probably self-inflicted, although evidence suggests it could also have been the result of an accident. In 2009, the British government apologized for the "appalling" way Turing had been treated. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon.

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The Jonestown Massacre,1978 -

On November 18, 1978, cult leader Jim Jones ordered the entire population of the Peoples Temple in Guyana to imbibe a soft drink laced with cyanide. In total, 918 individuals died at the remote settlement, including Jones.

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Georgi Markov (1929–1978) -

Bulgarian dissident and BBC journalist Georgi Markov died in London on September 11, 1978 after being fatally poisoned with ricin delivered from the tip of an umbrella. His killer jabbed the defector in the back of the leg before disappearing into crowds on Waterloo Bridge.

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Bhopal disaster, 1984 -

A deadly gas leak on the night of December 2–3, 1984 at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, exposed over 500,000 people to highly toxic methyl isocyanate. An estimated 15,000 people died in the first month alone after the accident, with 100,000 more suffering permanent injuries in what remains the world's worst industrial disaster.

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Tokyo subway sarin attack, 1995 -

On March 20, 1995, the odorless, colorless, and highly toxic nerve gas sarin was released in the Tokyo subway system in an attack orchestrated by members of the Japan-based new religious movement AUM Shinrikyo. Thirteen people died, and thousands of others were injured. The cult's leader, Shoko Asahara, was accused of masterminding the attack. He was later tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, and eventually executed on July 6, 2018.

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Heaven's Gate,1997 -

The Heaven's Gate cult led by Marshall Applewhite and characterized as a UFO religion ceased to exist on March 19-20, 1997 when Applewhite convinced 38 followers to take their own lives by taking lethal amounts of phenobarbital so that their souls could board an extraterrestrial spacecraft that would transport them to a next level of life.

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Moscow theater hostage crisis, 2002 -

On October 23, 2002, around 50 Chechen rebels stormed a Moscow theater, taking up to 800 people hostage during a musical show. The Russian authorities responded by pumping an undisclosed chemical agent into the building's ventilation system as a prelude to a rescue operation. While all 40 of the insurgents were killed, 130 hostages died during the siege due to the toxic substance pumped into the venue. This image from Russian TV shows Chechen rebels at the moment they seized the theater.

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Victor Yuschenko, 2004 -

Ukrainian politician Victor Yuschenko was President of Ukraine from January 23, 2005 to February 25, 2010. During his 2004 election campaign, Yuschenko was poisoned with near-lethal amounts of a potent dioxin, commonly used as a chemical defoliant. Yuschenko survived the assassination attempt, but suffered temporary disfigurement as a result of the poisoning.

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Alexander Litvinenko (1962–2006) -

On November 1, 2006, British-naturalized Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalized in London. It was later ascertained that he'd been poisoned with radionuclide polonium-210. A prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko died on November 23. Many point the finger at the Russian authorities for the attack.

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Kim Jong-nam (1971–2017) -

In an attack that was caught on CCTV, Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, was assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia on February 13, 2017 after being exposed to the deadly VX nerve agent.

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Sergei Skripal, 2018 -

Former Russian military intelligence officer and double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned with a Russian-developed Novichok nerve agent near his home in Salisbury, England, on March 14, 2018. Skripal, seen here shopping in a still image from CCTV footage recorded in February of that year, survived the assault.

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Yulia Skripal, 2018 -

Sergei Skripal's daughter Yulia (pictured), who was visiting him from Moscow, was also poisoned. The nerve agent had been delivered using a perfume bottle and sprayed onto Sergei Skripal's front door. The bottle was later discarded, only to be retrieved by a local resident, Dawn Sturgess, who later died after applying the fragrance to her wrist.

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Alexei Navalny, 2020 -

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny escaped with his life in August 2020 after being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and recovering in Berlin, Germany. He retuned to Moscow on January 17, 2021, and was promptly arrested and later imprisoned. The staunch anti-corruption activist Navalny died on February 15 or 16, 2024 under questionable circumstances in a remote penal colony.

Sources: (The Washington Post) (Historic UK) (Britannica) (History) (BBC) (The Atlantic) (DW) (Euronews) (The Guardian)

See also: History's most notorious assassinations

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