BRITAIN: A former Russian spy who is fighting for his life in a London hospital after being poisoned with the toxic metal thallium was targeted because he was an "enemy of Vladimir Putin", friends said yesterday.
Doctors treating Alexander Litvinenko, who defected to Britain six years ago, believe he has a 50/50 chance of survival and faces a critical three weeks, according to the exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who visited Mr Litvinenko in hospital at the weekend.
Scotland Yard has launched an inquiry into the "suspicious poisoning" of the former KGB officer, which allegedly took place at a sushi bar in Piccadilly, west London, at the beginning of the month. Mr Litvinenko had been meeting a contact offering him information about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and critic of the Kremlin who was assassinated in October.
The defector, who has been granted asylum and citizenship in Britain, believes he is being pursued by the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), the successor to the KGB, after claiming the Russian secret service had plotted to kill Mr Berezovsky. The FSB says Mr Litvinenko is Mr Berezovsky's stooge and the accusations are absurd.
Mr Litvinenko met his contact, an Italian, over a late lunch at Itsu in Piccadilly. He fell ill that evening but doctors initially believed he had food poisoning, Mr Berezovsky said. But as he became worse, they started a new investigation and confirmed he had been poisoned by thallium.
Thallium attacks the central nervous system by displacing potassium, which is vital for nerves to function. A quarter of a teaspoon is a fatal dose.
Mr Litvinenko has been attacked in Britain before, according to Mr Berezovsky, when a petrol bomb was lobbed at his London home in October 2004. He is under armed guard at University College Hospital in London.
In 1998, Mr Litvinenko publicly accused his FSB superiors of ordering him to kill Mr Berezovsky. In 1999 and 2000, he spent nine months in jail awaiting trial charged with abuse of office. He defected in 2000, and was tried in absentia and given a suspended sentence. Mr Berezovsky said: "The reason [ for the poisoning] is absolutely clear. He is an enemy of Putin." He said Mr Litvinenko had been imprisoned "without any reason at all, just because he decided to protect me".
Alexei Mukhin, director of the Centre for Political Information in Moscow, said "Litvinenko is on Berezovsky's payroll, there's no doubt about that. I wouldn't be surprised if Litvinenko poisoned himself to raise this fuss and try to blow up a storm about these documents which supposedly show the FSB was connected to Anna Politkovskaya's death."