A former Russian spy who is fighting for his life in a London hospital after being poisoned with the toxic metal thallium was targeted because he was an ”enemy of Vladimir Putin”, friends said on Sunday.
Doctors treating Alexander Litvinenko, who defected to Britain six years ago, believe he has a 50/50 chance of survival and faces a critical three weeks, according to the exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who visited Litvinenko in hospital at the weekend.
Scotland Yard has launched an inquiry into the ”suspicious poisoning” of the former KGB officer, which allegedly took place at a sushi bar in Piccadilly, west London, at the beginning of the month. Litvinenko had been meeting a contact offering him information about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and critic of the Kremlin who was assassinated in October.
The defector, who has been granted asylum and citizenship in Britain, believes he is being pursued by the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), the successor to the KGB, after claiming the Russian secret service had plotted to kill Berezovsky. The FSB says he is Berezovsky’s stooge and says his accusations are absurd.
Litvinenko met his contact, an Italian, over a late lunch at Itsu in Piccadilly. He fell ill that evening but doctors initially believed he had food poisoning, Berezovsky said. The tycoon said: ”The hospital … initially thought something was wrong with his meal, in spite of family and friends telling them he was poisoned. He became worse and worse, they started a new investigation and confirmed that he had been poisoned by thallium.”
Thallium attacks the central nervous system by displacing potassium, which is vital for nerves to function. A quarter of a teaspoon is a fatal dose for an adult.
Litvinenko is being treated by John Henry, the clinical toxicologist at St Mary’s hospital in London who was one of the first to suggest that the Ukrainian leader, Victor Yushchenko, had been poisoned with dioxins.
The treatment of Litvinenko’s condition is likely to include dosages of Prussian Blue, the dye in blue ink, which is used to prevent thallium being absorbed back into the body after it reaches the intestine.
He has been attacked in Britain before, according to Berezovsky, when a petrol bomb was lobbed at his London home in October 2004. He is under armed guard at University College Hospital in London.
Berezovsky is an arch-enemy of Putin, and Litvinenko forms part of his London circle. An associate of Berezovsky, Alex Goldfarb, arranged Litvinenko’s defection to Britain and Berezovsky has helped to finance his new life.
In 1998, Litvinenko publicly accused his FSB superiors of ordering him to kill Berezovsky. In 1999 and 2000, he spent nine months in jail awaiting trial charged with abuse of office. He defected in 2000, and was tried in absentia and given a suspended sentence of three and a half years. Berezovsky said: ”The reason [for the poisoning] is absolutely clear. He is an enemy of Putin.” He said Litvinenko had been imprisoned in Russia ”without any reason at all, just because he decided to protect me”.
Oleg Gordievsky, the highest ranking KGB officer ever to collaborate with British intelligence, said more should be done to protect Russian exiles in Britain.
”People like him and myself have helped the British enormously with our knowledge, so why do the British authorities permit the assassins to travel into Britain?” he asked.
The incident has been seized on by other opponents of Putin. Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen separatist spokesperson who lives in Britain, told Sky News: ”The methods the Russian government is using in the war in Chechnya, and this is what Alexander Litvinenko and his friend Anna Politkovskaya, the murdered journalist, were saying in the first place, has now long been exported from Chechnya to other countries.”
Police launched an inquiry on Friday after being informed of the incident. Officers visited the sushi bar on Saturday to ask for CCTV footage. The restaurant has no cameras. They did not interview staff.
Itsu’s operations director, Glenn Edwards, said: ”Its James Bond territory, isn’t it? It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon three weeks ago, and two individuals sitting in the corner wouldn’t have been noticed — our shop at Piccadilly serves 8 000 people a week — we’ve no idea what could have happened between them.”
Associates say Litvinenko (43)and described as a fit man, has been unable to eat for nearly three weeks because his stomach and tongue were affected by the poisoning. Goldfarb, who visited him on Sunday, said: ”He looks like a cancer patient who has undergone heavy chemotherapy. He’s lost his hair, his eyes are bloodshot and he can’t speak properly.”
He was treated first at Barnet hospital in north London but moved after his condition deteriorated. Police said his condition was ”serious but stable”.
Alexei Mukhin, director of the Centre for Political Information in Moscow, expressed scepticism about suggestions that the Russian government was behind the poisoning. ”This could all be part of a big political game, an information war on the Kremlin, organised by Boris Berezovsky,” he said.
”Litvinenko is on Berezovsky’s payroll, there’s no doubt about that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Litvinenko poisoned himself to raise this fuss and try to blow up a storm about these documents which supposedly show the FSB was connected to Anna Politkovskaya’s death. It’s like soldiers who shoot themselves in the foot.
”I knew Litvinenko in the 1990s and he always struck me as a boltun [windbag, tittle-tattler] who made accusations all the time but couldn’t back them up.”
Profile: Alexander Litvinenko
He claims to be a patriot who has been punished for daring to tell the truth about Putin’s Russia. His former employers dismiss him as an attention-seeking fabricator in the pay of one of the president’s most bitter enemies.
Alexander Litvinenko (43) the former KGB agent who defected to Britain six years ago, has been a thorn in Moscow’s side since 1998, when he appeared at a press conference to claim that the Russian secret service was being used to carry out assassinations and extort money from big business.
His claims he had been ordered by a superior to kill the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Litvinenko was formerly his bodyguard. After his revelations, he was in and out of jail in Russia on charges of abuse of office. He fled to Turkey in October 2000 and contacted Alex Goldfarb, a Berezovsky associate who brought him to Britain, where his defection was announced in the Sun the day he arrived. He was granted political asylum and later citizenship.
Litvinenko’s gravest allegation is made in a book he wrote in 2003, The FSB Blows Up Russia, in which he accuses the secret service of planting a bomb at apartments in the city of Ryazan two weeks after apartment bombings which killed 246 people in September 1999. Those explosions were blamed on Chechen rebels and triggered the second Chechen war.
The bombings are controversial because of suspicions about possible involvement of the FSB. – Guardian Unlimited Â