RUSSIA: Russia's secret service is accused of the poisoning, but there may be more to it, writes Séamus Martin
The case of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy wanted for treason in Moscow and now hospitalised in London, has focused attention on substances such as dioxin and thallium and allegations of official Russian state involvement in attempted murder abroad.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the Committee of State Security (KGB) was broken into several components. Of these the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) represent the traditional cloak-and-dagger espionage agencies and for some unexplained reason UK publications have concentrated on the FSB as the possible culprit for Mr Litvinenko's poisoning. Since the attempt took place in London one would imagine that the SVR might have warranted greater attention.
There is only one proven case of poison being used in recent years by Russian security operatives. In April 2002 a poisoned letter was delivered by an agent to a mysterious Arab known as Khattab who had joined Chechen separatists in their war against Moscow. He opened the letter and died five minutes later.
On the other hand a suspected attempt to poison the journalist Anna Politkovskaya on a flight to Beslan, where schoolchildren were under siege, failed. So too did the dioxin poisoning, blamed by many on Russia, of Viktor Yushchenko who is now president of Ukraine.
Ms Politkovskaya was later murdered in more direct fashion when she was shot at her Moscow apartment block last month, and her former deputy editor, Yuri Shchekochikhin, may have been poisoned in 2003 while investigating financial irregularities in a furniture company run by former KGB officers.
I should declare a personal interest in the latter case as I knew Yuri Shchekochikhin quite well and enjoyed his company.
The score in the alleged poisonings by Russian security forces is therefore pretty poor: one man (Khattab) proved to have been killed by poison, one man (Shchekochikhin) possibly killed by poison, two failed attempts (Politkovskaya and Yushchenko) and one probable failure (Litvinenko).
The question arises that if they could be so effective in one case, why did the security services fail in others? There are a number of possible answers: firstly, the failures may have been "warnings" rather than attempted killings; secondly, the attempts may have been botched; and thirdly, the poisonings may have been carried out not by the security services but by other, less professional groups.
In the Litvinenko case a great deal of the reportage in the UK has concentrated on the "evidence" of people described as his "friends". The friend most often quoted has been Alexander Goldfarb, a frequent visitor to Mr Litvinenko in his London hospital.
Mr Goldfarb has made definitive statements not only accusing the Russian authorities, but President Putin himself, of involvement in the attempted murder.
No concrete evidence has yet been discovered to implicate the FSB or the SVR, let alone Mr Putin, in the poisoning. There is, however, a substantial body of evidence to show that Mr Goldfarb has strong personal reasons to try to pin the blame on the Kremlin.
Alexander Goldfarb is a lawyer and the right-hand man of Boris Berezovsky (aka Platon Yelenin), an exiled multi-millionaire oligarch and political intriguer who now lives in London. He once belonged to the group known as "the family" which surrounded Russian president Boris Yeltsin and wielded enormous political and financial influence in Moscow. He lost this influence when Mr Putin came to power and now faces charges of fraud and political corruption in Russia.
Mr Berezovsky has been accused of strong connections with the so-called "Chechen Mafia" in Moscow and was described in an article in Forbes magazine a decade ago as the "Godfather of the Kremlin" who had his business rivals murdered.
The author of the article (later expanded into book form), Paul Klebnikov, was the American editor of Forbes's Russian edition. As the left his Moscow office at 10pm on July 9th, 2004, Klebnikov was shot several times from a passing car. He died later in hospital.
There is no evidence that Mr Berezovsky was involved in Klebnikov's murder but the whole affair is redolent of the shadowy nature of certain areas of Russian business. In the Litvinenko affair this is linked to the even more shadowy area of espionage and counter-espionage; of Russian spies in Britain who have "gone over to the other side".
Conspiracy theories abound and this is hardly surprising as Boris Berezovsky, whatever the truth or falsehood of allegations made against him, has always been an arch conspirator.