AFP/London
An inquiry into the radiation poisoning of a former Russian spy opened yesterday with claims that there may have been an earlier assassination bid in the most sensational tale of espionage since the Cold War.
Alexander Litvinenko was killed—apparently via a cup of green tea laced with hard-to-detect polonium-210 -- in an upmarket London hotel in 2006.
The inquiry will look into claims of Russian state involvement and yesterday it heard chilling extracts from Litvinenko’s interviews with police conducted at his hospital deathbed.
Russia has refused to extradited the two men identified by British police as the chief suspects—Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun—who drank tea with Litvinenko on November 1, 2006.
Counsel to the inquiry Robin Tam said yesterday that traces of polonium found from a previous meeting between the three on October 16 in the offices of a London security firm may indicate a previous poisoning attempt.
“One of the most significant things that the evidence suggests is that Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium not once but twice,” he said.
Tam also revealed that a friend of Kovtun from Germany will testify that the Russian told him he had poison and needed a contact for a cook to kill Litvinenko.
“Kovtun said that he had a very expensive poison and that he needed the cook to put the poison in Litvinenko’s food or drink,” Tam said.
Litvinenko, who was doing work for Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service, died on November 23, 2006 -- three weeks after the poisoning.
A deathbed statement in his name accused president Vladimir Putin directly, saying that “the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life”.
The inquiry’s chairman Robert Owen said at the start of yesterday’s hearing that closed-doors hearings would examine intelligence material on “the issue of Russian state responsibility”.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported at the weekend that communications between London and Moscow intercepted by the US National Security Agency pointed to Russian state involvement.
At the time, Putin rejected the accusations as a “political provocation”.
There are other theories about who may have killed him, given Litvinenko’s investigative work in other European countries including Italy and Spain and his specialisation in researching organised crime.
Owen was the coroner in a previous inquest into the death but did not have the power to examine intelligence documents. He lobbied for an inquiry to be able to do so.
Under English law, such inquiries establish the facts of a case in public but do not result in convictions.
Britain announced the inquiry in July 2014, just days after the downing of a Malaysian passenger jet over eastern Ukraine—a tragedy blamed on Russia’s involvement in the conflict in the region—in what was seen as a way of punishing Moscow.
Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned on the direct orders of Russian president Vladimir Putin - “a common criminal dressed up as a head of state”, the widow’s lawyer told the public inquiry this afternoon.
Putin brought “nuclear terrorism to the streets” of London out of political revenge, the hearing was told.
In an act of “unspeakable barbarism” Litvinenko was silenced to prevent him exposing Putin and “his odious and deadly corruption”.
It was a “message of lethal deterrence to others” before Litvinenko could give evidence to a criminal trial in Spain.
The death sentence on the man who fled Moscow to become a British citizen, could not have been passed “without the personal knowledge and permission of Putin,” said Ben Emmerson QC.
“Putin should be unmasked by this inquiry as nothing more or less than a common criminal dressed up as a head of state.”
He considered Litvinenko such a traitor that Russian special forces used an image of him for target practice.
But far from treachery, Litvinenko was a whistleblower and patriot to his final day, said Emmerson.
The QC described the scene in November 2006 as “the haunting and iconic image” went round the world of Mr Litvinenko dying in a green UCH gown over 23 days of agonising pain as “his strength slowly left him and his organs began to fail.”
“It was the calculated, pre-planned murder of a British subject on the streets of our capital city,” he said.
“He had to be eliminated because he had become an enemy of the close-knit group of criminals who surround Putin.
“The startling truth which will be revealed by this inquiry is that a significant part of Russian organised crime is organised directly from the offices of the Kremlin - Putin’s Russia is a Mafia state.”
Litvinenko’s body tissue was so riddled with radiation he had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin in Highgate Cemetery.
One of Litvinenko’s books, The Gang from Lubyanka, named Putin as having links with the Tambov-Malyshev gang which dominated the St Petersburg underworld in the 1990s, the court heard.
As an expert on organised crime and the Kremlin, Litvinenko passed information to British Intelligence.
“His MI6 handler, who was codenamed Martin, arranged for regular payments to be made into his bank account,” said Mr Emmerson. Polonium can only be produced in an industrial setting involving a nuclear reactor.
Marina Litvinenko and a solicitor arrive outside the Royal Courts of Justice, in London.
