Post by Nictoshek on Aug 1, 2015 4:10:16 GMT -7
Marina Litvinenko, the widow of Alexander V. Litvinenko, outside the High Court in London after the inquiry into her husband’s death ended on Friday.
Inquiry Into Litvinenko Poisoning Ends With a Nugget of Debris
By ALAN COWELLJULY 31, 2015
LONDON — It provoked years of legal wrangling, diplomatic intrigue and dogged sleuthing by detectives from Scotland Yard seeking clues in abstruse nuclear science.
But in the end, the mystery behind the poisoning death of Alexander V. Litvinenko — a former officer of the K.G.B., a whistle-blower and a foe of the Kremlin — was unlocked by a discovery in the waste pipe under the wash basin of Room 382 in London’s upscale Millennium Hotel, a prominent lawyer in the case said Friday.
There, detectives found “a mangled clump of debris” laced with polonium 210, the rare radioactive toxic substance that killed Mr. Litvinenko in 2006, said Ben Emmerson, the lawyer representing the widowed Marina Litvinenko.
“The inevitable conclusion is that the person who poured that solution down the sink was knowingly handling the murder weapon itself,” Mr. Emmerson said Friday during closing arguments of the public inquiry into the death.
The oft-delayed investigation opened in January and involved testimony from 62 witnesses in 34 days of hearings. But the inquiry was boycotted or ignored by Russian officials, including President Vladimir V. Putin, whom Mr. Emmerson on Friday again blamed directly for the poisoning. The Russian leader has dismissed the accusation, and the country has refused to extradite the two Russian citizens, Andrei K. Lugovoi and Dmitri V. Kovtun, whom British prosecutors have accused of the killing.
The case has fascinated Britons and, at one point, plunged relations between London and Moscow into a chill that recalled the Cold War. British prosecutors say Mr. Litvinenko died after sipping green tea from a pot laced with polonium when he met Mr. Lugovoi, a former K.G.B. bodyguard, and Mr. Kovtun, a onetime Red Army officer, on Nov. 1, 2006, in the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel in central London’s Grosvenor Square. Mr. Litvinenko died 22 days later at 43.
Weeks before his death, Mr. Litvinenko and his family, who fled Russia in 2000, were granted British citizenship.
“It is a truism that most criminal cases, not matter how complex they are, ultimately turn on one item of evidence,” Mr. Emmerson said shortly before Judge Robert Owen closed the inquiry on Friday, saying he would publish his findings by the end of the year.
In this case, Mr. Emmerson said, that item was the clump of debris in the hotel plumbing.
“The reason that evidence is so pivotal, of course, is because Dmitri Kovtun stayed in that room on the very day that he and Mr. Lugovoi administered the fatal dose of polonium some floors below in the Pine Bar of the same hotel,” he said.
The lawyer’s dramatic flourish wove one more strand into a convoluted saga that has unfolded despite attempts by the British government to block scrutiny and to exclude public testimony by intelligence officials. Robin Tam, counsel to the inquiry, said Friday that Judge Owen had held closed hearings with unidentified witnesses.
Mr. Litvinenko died without knowing what had killed him. Only in the last few hours of his life did the authorities identify polonium 210 — an isotope once used as a nuclear trigger and manufactured almost exclusively in Russia — as the cause of death.
Once British scientists made that discovery, investigators identified traces of polonium at a string of places visited by Mr. Kovtun and Mr. Lugovoi, according to testimony at the inquiry.
Richard Horwell, a lawyer representing Scotland Yard, told the inquiry on Thursday that the investigation “has always had at its central core the science.”
“It is the scientific evidence that condemns Lugovoi and Kovtun,” he said. The two men “have no credible answer to the scientific evidence, and to the trail of polonium they left behind.”
Mr. Emmerson said the poisoning had been the third attempt on Mr. Litvinenko’s life in less than a month.
A central theme at the inquiry was whether the Russian state had been involved in the killing.
Mr. Emmerson said that since the poisoning, Mr. Kovtun and Mr. Lugovoi had benefited from a “wall of protection by corrupt elements in the Kremlin.” Mr. Lugovoi secured a seat in the Russian Parliament, and this year he received a medal of honor from Mr. Putin for “services to the motherland.”
In March, as the inquiry was initially set to conclude, Mr. Kovtun signaled that he would testify by video link from Moscow. But, citing legal restrictions, he refused to do so when the link was set up this week.
“The approach of the Russian authorities from start to finish speaks volumes and provides powerful support for the conclusion that Mr. Putin and his cronies in the Kremlin were not only behind the murder, but even now stand four square behind the murderers,” Mr. Emmerson said.
The polonium used in the poisoning, he said, was manufactured in Russia and “could not have been diverted for use as a murder weapon without the knowledge of Russian officials and the approval of Mr. Putin personally.”
The Russian Embassy in London issued a statement saying that the inquiry had failed to follow international law and that it had been politicized and biased.
At the time of his death, Mr. Litvinenko was investigating the Kremlin and Mr. Putin, seeking evidence of links with organized crime. “It was the work he did exposing the links between Putin’s cabal and organized crime gangs operating in Russia and elsewhere that provided the most direct and immediate motive for his murder,” Mr. Emmerson said.
He said Mr. Litvinenko had worked closely with one of the suspects in his poisoning, Mr. Lugovoi, on some investigations. But, Mr. Emmerson said, Mr. Litvinenko was unaware that Mr. Lugovoi was reporting Mr. Litvinenko’s inquiries “to the very people he was trying to expose.”