Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent living in exile in London, died in hospital on Thursday night, three weeks after apparently ingesting a mysterious poison which has baffled doctors.
In a statement at 11pm, a spokesperson for University College hospital, Jim Down, said: ”We are sorry to announce that Alexander Litvinenko died at 9.21pm.” He said ”every avenue” had been explored in the hospital’s attempt to save him. ”He was seriously ill when he was admitted on November 17 and the medical team at the hospital did everything possible to save his life.”
Litvinenko (43 a fierce critic of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, suffered a heart attack on Wednesday night and his condition had been deteriorating rapidly.
Hours before losing consciousness, as medical staff struggled to discover what had caused the critical illness, the former intelligence officer told a friend, the filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, how much he wanted to live. ”I want to survive, just to show them,” he told Nekrasov, who spoke to the Times. ”The bastards got me, but they won’t get everybody.”
Scotland Yard said on Thursday night it was treating the matter as an ”unexplained death” which is being investigated by its counter terrorism unit.
Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB agent ever to defect to Britain, said it was clear that his friend had been poisoned by the Kremlin. ”He was a hero of Russia, a hero of Britain, he loved Britain as much as he loved Russia,” Gordievsky told Sky News. ”He was fighting against the evil forces in Russia, against the KGB and against the authorities. He became a victim of rancour and revenge and malice, of the forces of Russia. It is the first time in the history of Britain that a British citizen has been killed by a hostile security service on British soil.”
Leaving the hospital, a family friend, Alex Goldfarb, who became something of a spokesperson for Litvinenko while he was ill, said he was terribly shocked. He told BBC News 24 that his friend had died with ”a clear conscience, a clear heart and with dignity”.
”We are all shocked and horrified at this terrible crime. Tonight is a night of mourning.”
He said he was confident that doctors would eventually find out what had killed Litvinenko. ”It will probably take some time, but as far as the family is concerned it really is irrelevant at this moment.”
Dr Andrea Sella, a chemistry expert from University College London, said the difficulty facing doctors trying to trace the cause of the illness was knowing what to look for. ”They have a problem. They have to find some unspecified poison and they don’t know what it is,” said Dr Sella. ”They don’t know whether it is a single substance or a mixture.”
The saga began on November 1 when Litvinenko meet two Russian men, one of them a former KGB officer, at a London hotel on November 1. Later that day he meet the Italian academic Mario Scaramella at a sushi bar in Piccadilly where it is said he received documents claiming to name the killers of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another vocal critic of Putin, who was shot outside her Moscow flat on October 7.
Several hours later he began to feel unwell and was admitted to hospital. Ten days later he spoke of it being a ”serious poisoning”. By November 17, his condition worsening, he was placed under armed guard in hospital and reports emerged that he might have been poisoned with thallium, a highly toxic substance.
Photographs then appeared of a gaunt, jaundiced figure who had lost his hair. Toxicologists studied his blood cells and speculated that he might have been poisoned with radioactive thallium. Doctors later ruled out poisoning by a number of substances and noted that his condition was consistent with a form of cancer.
Unconfirmed reports say some doctors suspected he had been made seriously ill by a chemotherapy treatment.
On Thursday morning, police investigating the poisoning were looking into the possibility that he might even have poisoned himself, the Guardian has learned. Before Litvinenko’s death, Scotland Yard said it was not running an attempted murder inquiry and senior officers are thought to have harboured doubts about claims that he was the victim of a Kremlin assassination plot.
Friends of Litvinenko dismissed suggestions that he had poisoned himself as ”complete rubbish”. ”Why would anyone poison themselves?” asked one.
”Nothing would suit the authorities in Britain more than for this to go away; one of the best ways of making it go away is to prove that it was not a poisoning. There is no question of him having done this to himself.”
Intelligence sources also said that they could not rule out the possibility that Litvinenko’s illness had been concocted in a way that implicated the Kremlin or Russian intelligence services. ”Poisoning is a well known tactic of Russian intelligence, but not only of Russian intelligence,” said a Whitehall source, adding that whoever was behind the affair might have wanted to frame the Russian authorities.
There was no comment on the death from Downing Street on Thursday night.
Another theory is that Litvinenko was not poisoned at all, and that his illness was the result of natural causes. Before the former KGB agent’s death, Dr Geoff Bellingan, the director of critical care at University College hospital said: ”We are now convinced that the cause of Mr Litvinenko’s condition was not a heavy metal such as thallium. Radiation poisoning is also unlikely.” However, the hospital dismissed reports that X-rays had located three foreign bodies inside his intestines. These were shadows caused by substances — notably Prussian blue — which had been administered during his treatment, the hospital said.
The X-ray claims were the latest among a series of sometimes conflicting stories that have emerged about Litvinenko’s condition. A public relations campaign swung into action after his health deteriorated suddenly a week ago, a campaign that was accompanied by repeated claims that Litvinenko had been the victim of a Kremlin assassination attempt.
One of London’s leading public relations companies, headed by Tim Bell, former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s former advertising consultant, fielded media queries about his condition. It also arranged for a photograph of Litvinenko in his hospital to be distributed to the media via a news agency.
A leading toxicologist, Professor John Henry, was contacted by a friend of the sick Russian and spoke of his fears that the former spy had been poisoned with thallium, a heavy metal, or with a radioactive substance. Henry had not been treating Litvinenko, however, and the hospital said he had not seen any of the test results when he first raised his theories in media interviews.
Bell’s public relations consultancy is retained by Boris Berezovsky, the multimillionaire Russian oligarch who is a friend of Litvinenko. Berezovsky also employs the individual who contacted Henry. The professor said on Thursday that he was withdrawing because he had had his ”fingers burnt”.
Berezovsky, like Litvinenko, is highly critical of Putin, and has faced a number of attempts to extradite him to Russia, most recently after being accused of plotting a coup, a claim he denies.
Litvinenko fled Russia six years ago. He is survived by his wife and their 12-year-old son. – Guardian Unlimited Â