Meanwhile, the Russian Ambassador in the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, said his country would not accept any decisions reached in secret and based on evidence not tested in open court.
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Litvinenko also assisted Spanish intelligence agencies with their investigations into Russian crime networks.
Lugovoi and Kovtun are thought to have killed Litvinenko in 2006, by lacing a pot of tea at the Millennium hotel in London with the extremely lethal radioactive poison. It said Mr Putin and Nikolai Patrushev, the then head of the FSB, “probably” sanctioned Mr Litvinenko’s death, and Mr Putin certainly expressed his approval after the event. “In particular, the conclusion that the Russian state was probably involved in the murder of Mr. Litvinenko is deeply disturbing”.
Putin is likely to have signed off the poisoning of Litvinenko with polonium-210 in part due to personal “antagonism” between the pair, it said, BBC reported. He says there’s a “strong probability” that the FSB directed the killing, and the operation was “probably approved” by Putin.
She called for British Prime Minister David Cameron to take urgent steps against Russian agents operating inside Britain in light of the report.
Russian authorities have refuted the conclusions of a British public inquiry into the death of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the report will “poison” Russia’s relationship with Britain.
“What happened was absolutely appalling and this report confirms what we’ve always believed, and what the last Labour government believed at the time of this terrible murder, which is it was state sponsored action”, he said.
“There was one goal from the beginning: slander Russian Federation and slander its officials”, she told reporters in Moscow. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the case against the Russians was politicized and “regrettable” and “has darkened the overall atmosphere of bilateral relations”.
Patrushev was the director of the FSB, the successor organisation to the Soviet-era KGB spy agency, at the time of the incident and has been a key security official since 2008.
He joined Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, in calling for Putin to be put under an European Union asset freeze and visa ban. But the inquiry’s report comes as the two countries are cautiously trying to work together against the Islamic State group in Syria.
Russian Federation has refused to extradite the two suspects, instead showering them with honours.
Lugovoi is a member of the Russian parliament, which means he is immune from prosecution.
The fall-out continued on Friday as Lugovoi rejected the inquiry as “nonsense”.
The evidence behind that seems to have come from secret intelligence heard in closed session.
“The charges against me are absurd”, he told the Interfax news agency.
The White House has described as “compelling” the evidence gathered for the British investigation into Litvinenko’s death, although the report has not yet been “thoroughly studied”. He suffered from the said syndrome after he was poisoned with 4.4GBq of polonium 210 on November 1, 2006 while he was drinking tea at the Pine Bar of the Millenium Hotel. In 2006, he met two Russian spies at a London hotel, and three weeks later, he was dead. They finally traced his symptoms to a suspected ingestion of radioactive polonium-210, which is fatal even when ingested in small amounts.
He lapsed into unconsciousness November 22, after telling his wife he loved her and died of heart failure the next day.
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2002: Litvinenko co-writes a book in which he accuses his former FSB superiors of carrying out a number of Russian apartment block bombings in 1999, which were blamed on Chechen militants. Litvinenko was seen as “having betrayed the FSB” and had regularly targeted Putin with ‘highly personal public criticism, ‘ including an accusation of paedophilia. Yet the only way Putin will persuade the rest of the world to accept his word over Owen’s is to send Lugovoi and Kovtun to face trial in England.
