Ex-Russian spy Litvinenko to be buried in London
Ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died last month after being poisoned, was scheduled to be buried in London today, his friends said.
About 30 family members and friends had travelled to Britain from Russia and Italy to attend the ceremony in northern London, according to an associate of the former spy.
Russian investigators said they had begun questioning in the radiation poisoning death of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko, a case that has left radiation traces from a London soccer stadium to the British Embassy in Moscow.
One of the figures to be questioned is former Russian agent Andrei Lugovoi, seen by some as the key to the case, which British police yesterday said they were treating as murder.
Together with colleagues from Scotland Yard, Russian investigators met yesterday with a security service agent turned businessman who saw MR Litvinenko on the day he is believed to have fallen ill with the polonium-210 poisoning that eventually killed him. A Russian news agency quoted lawyer Andrei Romashov as saying that Dmitry Kovtun had testified on Tuesday and yesterday.
Mr Kovtun was one of a trio of Russian businessmen whose desire for deals and love of football had taken them to London on November 1. He and the others say they met briefly with Litvinenko at a hotel bar before leaving for a match between CSKA Moscow and Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium.
The stadium is where Boris Berezovsky, the flamboyant, fiercely anti-Kremlin Russian tycoon routinely collects his friends and associates in a private box. Mr Litvinenko joined Mr Berezovsky’s émigré circle after fleeing Russia in 2000.
The stadium was added to the map of clues yesterday.
Katherine Lewis, spokeswoman for the Health Protection Agency, said faint levels of polonium-210 had been found at two locations there. The radiation was “barely detectable” and posed no public health risk, she said.
Traces of radiation have been found at 13 sites including the hotel where the soccer fans met with Litvinenko, the sushi bar where he went afterward to meet with an Italian contact and three British Airways planes that ply the London-Moscow route.
The British Embassy in Moscow said yesterday that experts had found minor traces of radiation there, too, but they presented no health risk to the public. The embassy did not specify where the radiation was found or what its source might be.
Kovtun and Lugovoi visited the embassy last month to discuss the Litvinenko case with embassy officials.
Romashov said that his own client, Mr Lugovoi, had not yet been questioned. The Prosecutor-General’s Office confirmed in a brief statement that it had started questioning, but did not say with whom.
In comments to the Russian channel NTV, Romashov said Scotland Yard investigators told Lugovoi that he would be questioned as a witness, not as a suspect, possibly on Thursday or Friday.
Lugovoi, a former security service agent whose business interests include a share of a large beverage and wine plant in Russia and security services, has been at the centre of media attention, and ABC News quoted an unnamed British official as saying he was British investigators’ ”prime suspect”. He is also among the soccer fans whom Litvinenko met on November 1.
However, a British official said yesterday: “Lugovoi is one of many people investigators are looking to question but I wouldn’t call him a suspect at this point.”
