Litvinenko, the former Moscow agent poisoned with polonium in London

Aleksandr Litvinenko, former KGB and later FSB agent, with positions in the Economic Security and Organized Crime Unit, in anti-terrorism during the first war in Chechnya, and then for a secret crime prevention unit with tasks on the edge of legality, he died on November 23, 2006 in London after an agony of over three weeks. Only a few hours before his death, the doctors who had tried to treat him were able to identify what was poisoning him, polonium 210, a rare substance whose traces were, in the following years, found by investigators in London and abroad. Read also After escaping from Russia in 2000, Litvinenko had worked for MI6. In the 1990s “Sacha” had entered a collision course with the then new director of the FSB Vladimir Putin for having publicly denounced the orders to kill politicians and entrepreneurs given to the secret service unit he headed. He had been arrested and involved in criminal investigations until he managed to leave the country. In Great Britain he would later receive political asylum. In 2015, the ‘public inquiry’ (which unlike a normal investigation allows the viewing of classified material in closed sessions) chaired in Great Britain by Judge Sir Robert Owen to shed light on instigators of the assassination, for which the two alleged material perpetrators Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun had already been indicted, had established the “strong probability” that the two were operating under the direction of the FSB and that “the operation had probably been approved by Nikolai Patrushev (then director of the FSB) and also by President Putin “. Some of the sections of the report of over 300 pages, which can be read as a spy story, were it not a reconstruction of the darker aspects of Putinian power, were classified. The British government had been forced to initiate a public investigation, after an initial refusal contested in the High Court by Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, who with the surname chosen upon her arrival in England, Carter, presented the appeal against Russia to the Court traces of polonium were found inside a teapot, on the table in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London where Litvinenko met Lugovoi and Kovtun on November 1, 2006. Traces that allowed the British investigators to reconstruct the two different attempts to kill Litvinenko, the first, which failed due to the insufficient dose of polonium used, on 16 October, the second two weeks later, on 1 November. The choice of substance, the report emphasized, “was intended to be an example”. The autopsy conducted on Litvinenko is considered one of the most dangerous tests in the history of forensic medicine. previous year, commissioned by superiors to kill Boris Berezovsky, who later died under unclear circumstances in the bathroom of his residence outside London in 2013. If former oligarch Berezovsky, “one of the key figures in the investigation,” friend of Litvinenko since 1994, to whom he had financed his expatriation and maintenance in London for several years, “had he been alive at the time of the investigation, he would have been an important witness”. In London, Litvinenko, who less than a month before being poisoned had been a naturalized British citizen, had also denounced the involvement of the FSB in the explosions of apartment buildings across Russia in 1999 that led to the second war in Chechnya. And, again, in the early nineties in Moscow, he had investigated the links between Putin and the Petersburg Tambov underworld clan. The two Russians indicted in Great Britain are therefore Lugovoi, former agent of the KGB and then of the Federal Protection Service, former deputy, therefore protected by immunity, friend of Litvinenko in the nineties, Kovtun, former KGB, also in Russia, to free foot: Russia which refused the extradition request of both. In a 2002 conversation with the Soviet-era dissident who found refuge in London Bukovsky, Litvinenko, whom the Russian apparatuses regarded as a “traitor” like Sergei Skripal, said he had received a phone call from an old FSB contact who he had said to him: “Do you feel safe in Great Britain? but how, don’t you remember Trozky?”. The last mystery, Putin’s declaration at the news of his death had been: “Who did it is not the Almighty Lord and Litvinenko is unfortunately not Lazarus. ” The widow later found a diary of her husband, with the sentence: “When Lazarus gets up from his deathbed, nobody asked him questions. It is necessary to respect the silence of the dead”. No one has yet figured out what they both meant.