Deborah Haynes
Reuters
Friday, November 24, 2006

Friends of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko accused "evil forces" in Russia on Friday of being responsible for his death in London and said the poisoning of the ex-colonel was an act of revenge.

Russia said it was "silly" to suggest the Kremlin had orchestrated a plot against 43-year-old Litvinenko, a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. British doctors said Litvinenko had been poisoned but did not know with what.

Litvinenko died on Thursday, the eve of an EU-Russia summit in Helsinki at which Putin could face media questions about the former spy that could overshadow the main agenda.

"He was fighting against the evil forces in Russia, against the KGB, against the authorities which are suppressing democracy and liberal freedoms in Russia," Oleg Gordievsky, a friend of Litvinenko, told Sky television.

"He became a victim of ... revenge and malice of those forces in Russia," said Gordievsky, also a former Russian agent who defected to Britain.

Litvinenko, who lost his hair and suffered organ failure, died in a London hospital three weeks after being poisoned.

One doctor said the type of poison used may never be known. Medical experts ruled out earlier suggestions that it was a heavy metal such as thallium or a radioactive substance.

British police said they were investigating Litvinenko's "unexplained" death. He became a British citizen on October 1.

If Russia was found to have had a hand in the poisoning, there could be serious diplomatic consequences. It would be the first such incident known in the West since the Cold War.

"THE BASTARDS"

"The bastards got me. But they won't get everybody," Litvinenko told friend and filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov earlier this week, according to Friday's Times newspaper.

Litvinenko, who fled to Britain in 2000 with his wife and son and was granted asylum, said he fell ill after meeting two Russians at a hotel. He had been investigating the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, also a critic of Putin, who was gunned down at her Moscow flat on October 7.

A source in the Russian delegation in Helsinki told reporters "It is a human tragedy. The man was poisoned. But the accusations towards the Kremlin are so unbelievable, they are too silly to be commented on by the president or anyone from the Russian side."

The Moscow daily Kommersant quoted businessman Andrei Lugovoy, a former officer in the FSB state security service, on Friday as saying he and two other men met Litvinenko in a London hotel on November 1, the day before he complained of feeling ill.

Lugovoy said he had been in touch with Litvinenko several times in London on business matters.

Litvinenko served in the KGB's counter-intelligence department and then the Federal Security Service's (FSB) highly secret organized crime group. The FSB is the main successor organization to the Soviet KGB and deals with internal threats.

In 1998, he turned on his former comrades and told a Moscow news conference that senior FSB officers had planned to murder Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky.

Litvinenko co-wrote a 2002 book "Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within", alleging FSB agents coordinated apartment block bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people in 1999. Russian officials blamed the bombings on Chechen guerrillas.