Fires The
República Cromañón nightclub fire broke out in
Buenos Aires, Argentina on 30 December 2004, killing 194 people and leaving at least 1,492 injured. Most of the victims died from inhaling poisonous gases, including
carbon monoxide. After the fire, the technical institution INTI found that the level of toxicity due to the materials and volume of the building was 225 ppm of cyanide in the air. A lethal dose for rats is between 150 ppm and 220 ppm, meaning the air in the building was highly toxic. On 27 January 2013,
a fire at the Kiss nightclub in the city of
Santa Maria, in the south of Brazil, caused the poisoning of hundreds of young people by cyanide released by the combustion of soundproofing foam made with
polyurethane. By March 2013, 245 fatalities were confirmed.
Gas chambers canisters, found by the
Soviets in January 1945 at
Auschwitz Research of hydrogen cyanide by chemists
Carl Wilhelm Scheele and
Claude Bernard would become central to understanding the lethality of future gas chambers. In early 1942,
Zyklon B, which contains hydrogen cyanide, emerged as the preferred killing tool of
Nazi Germany for use in
extermination camps during
the Holocaust. The chemical was used to murder roughly one million people in
gas chambers installed in extermination camps at
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Majdanek, and elsewhere. Most of the people who were murdered were
Jews, and by far the majority of these murders took place at Auschwitz. The constituents of Zyklon B were manufactured by several companies under licenses for
Degesch, a corporation co-owned by
IG Farben,
Degussa and
Th. Goldschmidt AG. It was sold to the
German Army and the
Schutzstaffel (SS) by the distributors Heli and
Testa, with Heli supplying it to concentration camps at
Mauthausen,
Dachau, and
Buchenwald and Testa to Auschwitz and Majdanek. Camps also occasionally bought Zyklon B directly from the manufacturers. Of the 729
tonnes of Zyklon B sold in Germany in 1942–44, 56 tonnes (about eight percent of domestic sales) were sold to concentration camps. Auschwitz received 23.8 tonnes, of which six tonnes were used for fumigation. The remainder was used in the gas chambers or lost to spoilage (the product had a stated shelf life of only three months). Testa conducted fumigations for the
Wehrmacht and supplied them with Zyklon B. They also offered courses to the SS in the safe handling and use of the material for fumigation purposes. In April 1941, the German agriculture and interior ministries designated the SS as an authorized applier of the chemical, and thus they were able to use it without any further training or governmental oversight. Hydrogen cyanide gas has been used for
judicial execution in some states of the United States, where cyanide was generated by reaction between
potassium cyanide (or
sodium cyanide) dropped into a compartment containing
sulfuric acid, directly below the chair in the
gas chamber.
Suicide Cyanide salts are sometimes used as fast-acting suicide devices. Cyanide reacts at a higher level with high stomach
acidity. •
Viktor Meyer, 19th-century German chemist, died by suicide in 1897 after taking cyanide • On 26 January 1904, company promoter and swindler
Whitaker Wright died by ingesting cyanide in a court anteroom immediately after being convicted of fraud. •
Gustav Wied, Danish novelist, poet, and playwright, in 1914 •
Badal Gupta, a revolutionary from Bengal, who launched an attack on the Writers' Building in Kolkata, consumed cyanide in 1930 immediately after the attack. • In February 1937, the Uruguayan short story writer
Horacio Quiroga died by drinking cyanide at a hospital in
Buenos Aires. • In 1937, polymer chemist
Wallace Carothers died by drinking cyanide. •
Pritilata Waddedar, an Indian revolutionary nationalist, took cyanide in 1932 to avoid capture by
Indian Imperial Police, British India •
Erwin Rommel (1944),
Adolf Hitler's wife
Eva Braun (1945), and Nazi leaders
Heinrich Himmler (1945), possibly
Martin Bormann (1945), and
Hermann Göring (1946) all died by ingesting cyanide. Pure liquid
prussic acid (a historical name for hydrogen cyanide), was the favored
suicide agent of
Nazi Germany. • It is speculated that, in 1954,
Alan Turing used an apple that had been injected with a solution of cyanide to die after being convicted of having a
homosexual relationship, which was
illegal at the time in the United Kingdom, and forced to undergo hormonal castration to avoid prison. An inquest determined that Turing's death from cyanide poisoning was a suicide, although this has been disputed. • In 1958,
Douglas Kelley, a former
United States Army Military Intelligence Corps, ingested a capsule of
potassium cyanide. He was an officer who served as chief psychiatrist at
Nuremberg Prison during the first months of the
Nuremberg trials. Kelley examined 22 high ranking officials of the Nazi party, including Adolf Hitler's second-in-command Hermann Göring and Hitler's deputy
Rudolf Hess. • Members of the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, whose
insurgency lasted from 1983 to 2009, used to wear cyanide vials around their necks with the intention of taking them if captured by the government forces. • On 22 June 1977, Moscow,
Aleksandr Dmitrievich Ogorodnik, a Soviet diplomat accused of spying on behalf of the Colombian Intelligence Agency and the US
Central Intelligence Agency, was arrested by Soviet authorities. During the interrogations, Ogorodnik offered to write a full confession and asked for his pen. Inside the pen cap was a hidden cyanide pill, provided by his CIA handlers to be used in the event of his capture. Ogorodnik bit the pen cap, releasing the cyanide and causing Ogorodnik to die before he hit the floor, according to the Soviets. • On 18 November 1978,
Jonestown. A total of 909 people died in Jonestown, some of them from apparent cyanide poisoning, in an event termed "revolutionary suicide" by Jones and some members on an audio tape of the event and in prior discussions. The poisonings in Jonestown followed the murder of five others by
Temple members at
Port Kaituma, including United States Congressman
Leo Ryan, an act that Jones ordered. Four other Temple members died by murder-suicide in
Georgetown at Jones' command. • On 6 June 1985, serial killer
Leonard Lake died in custody after having ingested cyanide pills he had sewn into his clothes. •
Jason Altom, a promising graduate student in the lab of Nobel Prize–winning chemist
EJ Corey at Harvard, died after drinking potassium cyanide in 1998. • MP Prasad, a
goldsmith in
Palakkad, India, died by suicide in 2006. Prasad is reportedly the only person to have documented the taste of potassium cyanide. • On 28 June 2012,
Wall Street trader
Michael Marin ingested a cyanide pill seconds after a guilty verdict was read in his arson trial in
Phoenix, Arizona; he died minutes after. • On 22 June 2015, John B. McLemore, a horologist and the central figure of the podcast
S-Town, died after ingesting cyanide. • On 29 November 2017,
Slobodan Praljak died from drinking
potassium cyanide, after being convicted of
war crimes by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. •
Ramon Sampedro, Spanish tetraplegic and activist whose assisted suicide in 1998 provoked a national debate about euthanasia, and who was the subject of the Oscar-winning film
The Sea Inside.
Mining and industrial • In 1993, an illegal spill resulted in the death of seven people in
Avellaneda, Argentina. In their memory, the National Environmental Conscious Day (Día Nacional de la Conciencia Ambiental) was established. • In 2000, a
spill at Baia Mare, Romania, resulted in the worst environmental disaster in Europe since
Chernobyl. • In 2000, Allen Elias, CEO of Evergreen Resources was convicted of knowing endangerment for his role in the cyanide poisoning of employee Scott Dominguez. This was one of the first successful criminal prosecutions of a corporate executive by the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Murder •
John Tawell, a murderer who in 1845 became the first person to be arrested as the result of telecommunications technology. •
Grigori Rasputin (1916; attempted, later killed by gunshot) • The
Goebbels children (1945) •
Stepan Bandera (1959) •
Jonestown, Guyana, was the site of a large mass
murder–suicide, in which over 900 members of the
Peoples Temple drank
potassium cyanide–laced
Flavor Aid in 1978. •
Chicago Tylenol murders (1982) •
Timothy Marc O'Bryan (1966–1974) died on October 31, 1974, by ingesting potassium cyanide placed into a giant
Pixy Stix. His father,
Ronald Clark O'Bryan, was convicted of his murder, plus four counts of attempted murder. O'Bryan put potassium cyanide into five giant Pixy Stix that he gave to his son and daughter along with three other children. Only Timothy ate the poisoned candy and died. •
Bruce Nickell and Sue Snow (5 June 1986) were murdered by Stella Nickell who poisoned bottles of
Excedrin. •
Richard Kuklinski (1935–2006) •
Janet Overton (1942–1988). Her husband, Richard Overton, was convicted of poisoning her, but Janet's symptoms did not match those of classic cyanide poisoning, the timeline was inconsistent with cyanide poisoning, and the amount found was just a trace. The diagnostic method used was prone to false positives. Richard Overton died in prison in 2009. •
Urooj Khan (1966–2012), won the lottery and was found dead a few days later. A blood diagnostic reported a lethal level of cyanide in his blood, but the body did not display any classic symptoms of cyanide poisoning, and no link to cyanide could be found in Urooj's social circle. The diagnostic method used was the Conway diffusion method, prone to
false positives with artifacts of
heart attack and
kidney failure. The chemistry of this and other false positives could be linked to the
TBARS response following heart failure. •
Autumn Marie Klein (20 April 2013), a prominent 41-year-old neuroscientist and physician, died from cyanide poisoning. Klein's husband, Robert J. Ferrante, also a prominent neuroscientist who used cyanide in his research, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for her death. Robert Ferrante is appealing his conviction, claiming the cyanide was a false positive. •
Mirna Salihin died in hospital on 6 January 2016, after drinking a
Vietnamese iced coffee at a cafe in a shopping mall in
Jakarta. Police reports claim that cyanide poisoning was the most likely cause of her death. •
Jolly Thomas of
Kozhikode,
Kerala,
India was arrested in 2019 for the murder of 6 family members. Murders took place over a 14-year period, and each victim ate a meal prepared by the killer. The murders were allegedly motivated by wanting control of the family finances and property. •
Mei Xiang Li of
Brooklyn, New York, collapsed and died in April 2017, with cyanide later reported to be in her blood. However, Mei never exhibited symptoms of cyanide poisoning and no link to cyanide could be found in her life. •
Sararath "Am" Rangsiwutthiporn, who became quickly known as "Am Cyanide" in
Thai media, was arrested by the Thai police for allegedly poisoning 11 of her friends and acquaintances, spanning 2020 to 2023, with 10 deaths and 1 surviving supposed victim. According to an ongoing investigation, the number of victims is currently at 20-30 persons, mostly dead with several survived.
Warfare or terrorism • In 1988, between 3,200 and 5,000 people died in the
Halabja massacre owing to unknown chemical nerve agents. Hydrogen cyanide gas was strongly suspected. • In 1995, a device was discovered in a restroom in the
Kayabachō Tokyo subway station, consisting of bags of
sodium cyanide and
sulfuric acid with a remote controlled motor to rupture them, in what was believed to be an attempt by the
Aum Shinrikyo cult to produce toxic amounts of hydrogen cyanide gas. • In 2003,
Al Qaeda reportedly planned to release cyanide gas into the
New York City Subway system. The attack was supposedly aborted because there would not be enough casualties. ==Research==