Ex-KGB agent’s poisoning may be tied to slain journalist

LONDON – A former Russian spy poisoned in Britain and now hospitalized under guard may have been targeted for his criticism of former colleagues and his investigation into the killing of a prominent anti-Kremlin journalist, friends and fellow dissidents said Sunday.

Col. Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, said earlier this week that he fell ill Nov. 1 after a meal with a contact who claimed to have details about the slaying of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist gunned down last month in Moscow.

Litvinenko was under armed guard at University College Hospital in London. The hospital said he was in “serious but stable” condition.

“He is still very weak,” friend Alexander Goldfarb said outside the hospital. “He is in a fighting mood, though.”

A doctor treating Litvinenko told the British Broadcasting Corp. that tests showed he was poisoned by thallium – a toxic metal found in rat poison that can cause damage to the nervous system and organ failure. One gram can be lethal.

In an interview with the Sunday Times before his condition worsened, Litvinenko described how he had lunch with an Italian contact who claimed to have information on Politkovskaya’s killing.

British news outlets identified the contact as Mario Scaramella, an Italian academic who helped investigate KGB activity in Italy during the Cold War. Scaramella could not immediately be reached for comment.

“They probably thought I would be dead from heart failure by the third day,” Litvinenko is quoted as saying in the Sunday Times. “I do feel very bad. I’ve never felt like this before – like my life is hanging on the ropes.”

Police said a specialist crime unit began an investigation Friday into how Litvinenko may have been poisoned. No arrests had been made, said a Scotland Yard spokesman.

Litvinenko left Russia for Britain six years ago and has become an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. In a 2003 book, “The FSB Blows Up Russia,” he accused his country’s secret service agency of staging apartment-house bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people in Russia and sparked the second war in Chechnya.

Boris Berezovsky, the Russian dissident and tycoon who was at Litvinenko’s bedside on Friday, told The Associated Press he suspects Russia’s intelligence services of the poisoning.

“It’s not complicated to say who fights against him,” Berezovsky said in a telephone interview. “He’s (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s enemy, he started to criticize him and had lots of fears.”

Russian authorities did not immediately comment on the allegations.

Litvinenko joined the KGB in 1988 and rose to the rank of colonel in its successor, the Federal Security Service. He began specializing in terrorism and organized crime in 1991, and was transferred to the agency’s most secretive department on criminal organizations in 1997.

He fled Russia and claimed asylum in Britain in November 2000, two years after publicly accusing his FSB superiors of ordering him to kill Berezovsky, at the time a powerful Kremlin insider. Berezovsky said Sunday that Litvinenko fell out with his superiors after he exposed corruption within FSB ranks.

Before he left Russia, Litvinenko was jailed for nine months awaiting trial on charges of abusing his office; he was acquitted.