Litvinenko was dismissed from his Moscow job in 2000 and was given sanctuary in Britain, becoming a citizen in 2006.
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On his deathbed the fierce critic of the Kremlin, who fled Russian Federation six years before his murder, pointed the finger at Mr Putin – and named former colleagues Kovtun and Lugovoi as the men who poisoned him.
“It’s unthinkable that the prime minister would do nothing in the face of the damning findings”, Marina said.
“This was a blatant and unacceptable breach of the most fundamental tenets of worldwide law and civilised behaviour”.
“Such terminology is not allowed in our judicial practice nor is it allowed in the judicial practice of other countries and certainly can not be deemed by us as a verdict in any of its parts”, the spokesman said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mariya Zakharova said Thursday that the use by the British side of legal arrangements in political games creates a risky precedent.
“There was one goal from the beginning: slander Russian Federation and slander its officials”, she told reporters in Moscow.
“The results of the investigation made public today yet again confirm London’s anti-Russian position, its blinkeredness and the unwillingness of the English to establish the true reason of Litvinenko’s death”.
There he became an outspoken critic of the Kremlin under Putin and is said to have provided information to British intelligence services. In a statement read outside the Royal Courts of Justice, where the inquiry was held, she also called for economic sanctions and travel bans against the two suspects as well as Putin. But what probably sealed his fate was his allegation in October 2006 that Putin ordered the assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. “I am sure that they killed him on behalf of others”, he says.
“I have concluded that there is a strong probability that when Mr. Lugovoy poisoned Mr. Litvinenko, he did so under the direction of the FSB”.
President Vladimir Putin probably approved a plan by Russia’s FSB security service to kill former agent Alexander Litvinenko, a British judge said Thursday.
Although Prime Minister David Cameron called it a “state-sponsored action”, his government did not announce sanctions in response, instead summoning Moscow’s ambassador to London for talks lasting less than an hour.
Britain’s scope for strong action is limited, however. The New York Timesreports that British diplomats don’t want a little extrajudicial killing to prevent continued cooperation between Russian Federation and the West over resolving the war in Syria.
Published in the report as evidence, the article recounted a meeting between Putin and a boy “aged four or five” in a square near the Kremlin.
The U.K. government has put an asset freeze against Lugovoy and Kovtun, May added.
However, a ttempts to extradite the pair, who both deny involvement, have failed.
As a lawmaker, he is now immune from prosecution in Russian Federation. “I feel very emotional”, she said.
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Lugovoi also claimed he would have liked to testify at the inquiry but “was not allowed”.
