The mysterious death of a former Russian spy living in exile in London turned into an unprecedented public health scare on Friday when it emerged that he had been deliberately poisoned by a major dose of radioactive material.
Further traces of the substance were found at a sushi restaurant and at a central London hotel where Alexander Litvinenko had met a number of people before falling ill, and at his home in the city.
He was killed by polonium 210, a rare radioactive isotope that is so toxic that there may never be a post-mortem examination of Litvinenko’s body, for fear of causing further deaths.
Police and security sources said they had never encountered such an extraordinary death. ”Nothing like this has ever happened before,” said one Whitehall source. ”It is unprecedented; we are in uncharted territory.” One priority on Friday night was to establish who has access to polonium 210 anywhere in the world.
Government ministers, meanwhile, are said to be ”dreading” the possible repercussions of a public inquest into Litvinenko’s death, at which they expect his associates to make damning accusations against the Russian government.
On Friday night, health officials were contacting up to 100 people — hospital staff and relatives — who had come into contact with the former spy during his three weeks at two London hospitals, so they can be screened for contamination. The Home Secretary, John Reid, also convened Cobra, the government’s emergency planning committee, to discuss the situation.
Low risk
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said the risk to hospital staff was extremely low, as alpha radiation from the ex-agent’s body would need to be inhaled, swallowed or enter an open wound before causing harm. Normal hospital practices should have prevented this. Nor would anybody be at risk just because they had been close to Litvinenko.
But the agency said it could not assess the level of risk to the public who had visited locations that had been contaminated with the substance. Professor Roger Cox, director of the HPA’s centre for radiological, chemical and environmental hazards, said there was insufficient information to make such an assessment.
On Friday night, police were refusing to say how much of the substance was found at the hotel and restaurant, or at Litvinenko’s house in Muswell Hill, north London.
Radiation from the polonium was first detected in Litvinenko’s urine hours before he died on Thursday night. There is no antidote to the substance and the HPA said that such a large dose would always kill once ingested. Scientists are trying to use computer models, based on analysis of Litvinenko’s urine and the apparent damage to his organs over the past three weeks, to work out when he may have been poisoned.
While Scotland Yard says it is treating his death as suspicious, it is not describing its investigation as a murder inquiry. One possibility being considered is that Litvinenko poisoned himself.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command, which is conducting the investigation, said: ”We continue to carry out a thorough investigation. There will also be an extensive examination of CCTV [closed-circuit television] footage.”
Putin
Enemies of Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, blamed him — insisting the poisoning bore the hallmarks of an assassination by Litvinenko’s former colleagues from the FSB, a successor to the KGB. Litvinenko fled to Britain six years ago after revealing an alleged plot to murder Boris Berezovsky, a multimillionaire businessman also in exile in the United Kingdom.
On November 1, he met Mario Scaramella, an Italian academic, at a sushi restaurant. Scaramella showed him two e-mails that warned ”Russian intelligence officers speak more and more about necessity to use force” against critics of Russia, including Berezovsky and Litvinenko.
On Friday, Litvinenko’s associates, many of them employees of Berezovsky, produced a statement they said was made by Litvinenko last Tuesday, in which he blamed Putin for his impending death.
”The howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life,” he is said to have declared. ”May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but [also] to beloved Russia and its people.”
Putin brushed aside such claims on Friday, telling a press conference: ”There is no ground for speculation of this kind. A death of a man is always a tragedy and I deplore this and send my condolences to the family.”
Some of Putin’s aides went further, hinting at an expatriate plot to discredit the Russian government. ”I am far from being a champion of conspiracy theory,” said Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Putin’s chief envoy to the European Union. ”But it looks like we are facing a well-orchestrated campaign or a plan to consistently discredit Russia and its leader.”
The British Foreign Office confirmed on Friday night that officials had discussed Litvinenko’s death with the Russian ambassador at a meeting on Friday afternoon, and had asked Moscow for any information that would assist Scotland Yard with their inquiries. — Guardian Unlimited Â