Putin’s Spokesman Calls Litvinenko Inquiry a ‘Quasi-Investigation’

Russian president Vladimir Putin most likely signed off on the killing of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was fatally poisoned by radioactive tea in an upscale London hotel a decade ago, a British inquiry has found.

The judge said there was “no doubt” that Litvinenko was poisoned by Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, two Russians he met at a London hotel bar before falling ill in November 2006.

After the report’s release Thursday, Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Lugovoi as calling the British inquiry nonsense and saying it was politically motivated.

Litvinenko had fled Russian Federation in 2000 and was granted asylum in Britain, later becoming a British citizen and converting to Islam after befriending exiled Chechen separatist leaders. According to his wife, Litvinenko was on his deathbed when he blamed Putin for his condition.

Owen – a retired High Court judge appointed by the British government to head a public inquiry into the slaying – heard from dozens of witnesses during months of public hearings a year ago and also saw secret British intelligence evidence.

“The accusations brought against me are absurd”, he said.

It also raised serious domestic security concerns, Britain now being home to a large number of Russian dissidents opposed to Putin and to exiled “oligarchs”.

She accused Russian Federation of “a blatant and unacceptable breach of the most fundamental tenets of global law and of civilized behavior”.

“With what is happening in Syria, what is happening in Ukraine, what happened before in Georgia [in 2008], we now see a picture that is descending drop-by-drop”, said the president.

That may pose difficulties given the importance of Russia’s role in the Middle East, but without tough action people may ask if the Russian government has been allowed to get away with what has been described as an act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of London. As an expert study found, he was poisoned with radioactive polonium but the circumstances of his death have not been established to date.

The report, which contained classified evidence redacted from the version made public, said this suggested that Lugovoi and Kovtun “were acting for a state body rather than, say, a criminal organisation”.

Litvinenko, a Russian national, had been employed by the FSB and its predecessor organization, the KGB, until 1998 when the inquiry says he was kicked out for making public allegations of illegal activity within the spy service.

A spokesperson for British Prime Minister David Cameron, however, signaled that the government was unlikely to take strong measures, whle noting that the report “regrettably confirms what we and previous governments already believed to date”, The Guardian reports.

“There was one goal from the beginning: slander Russia and slander its officials”, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zhakarova told reporters.