Widow urges UK to act against Russian spies

The statement came after a British inquiry found that President Vladimir Putin probably approved a 2006 Russian intelligence operation to murder ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210 in London.

Judge Robert Owen said Thursday he is certain that Litvinenko was given tea laced with a fatal dose of polonium-210 at a London hotel in November 2006.

“The FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by [FSB leader] Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin”.

Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, two Russians identified as prime suspects by British police, probably carried out the poisoning under the instruction of Russian security services, the inquiry said.

Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun, who met with Mr Litvinenko in London, have denied involvement in the assassination and Russian Federation has refused to extradite them.

In response to the British report, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova refuted the allegations, saying that Britain’s handling of the case was “opaque” and “politicized”.

– 2000: Litvinenko flees Russian Federation and seeks political asylum in Britain, which was granted the following year.

Marina Litvinenko, widow of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, places her arm around her son Anatoly during a press conference in London, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2016. She called for sanctions against Putin.

The death of Alexander Litvinenko could have been “lifted right out of a spy novel” Earnest said during the daily briefing, calling it full of “salacious details”.

May called the report’s conclusion “deeply disturbing”, and described Russia’s alleged actions as a “blatant and unacceptable breach of global law and civilized behavior”. “I have further concluded that Mr. Kovtun was also acting under FSB direction”, Owen’s report continues.

This resulted in contamination of the hotel and the contamination pretty much spread across the streets of London wherever Mr. Litvinenko was after that moment.

“The fact that a public inquiry is based on classified data of special services, unnamed special services, and that the verdict based on these ephemeral data is brought with the abundant use of the words “possibly” and “probably”, the Kremlin spokesman explained.

“So many people said: ‘You’ll never get an inquiry; it won’t happen.’ Then they didn’t believe Sir Robert Owen would deliver his report”.

At the time of his death, Litvinenko was working for the British intelligence service MI6 and also for Spanish intelligence; he was passing on information on Russian organised crime networks and their links to the Kremlin. Litvinenko was seen as “having betrayed the FSB” and had regularly targeted Putin with “highly personal public criticism”, including an accusation of paedophilia.

– British Prime Minister David Cameron said the evidence in the report of a state-sponsored killing is “absolutely appalling”, and Britain summoned the Russian ambassador for a dressing-down and imposed an asset freeze on Lugovoi and Kovtun.