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May 22, 2007
Britain Charges Russian Businessman in Poisoning
By ALAN COWELL and STEVEN LEE MYERS

LONDON, May 22 — The British authorities said today they would seek the extradition of a single Russian businessman, Andrei Lugovoi, to face trial for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. agent who died of radiation poisoning caused by a rare isotope, Polonium 210.

The announcement by the Crown Prosecution Service made no mention of other Russians who met Mr. Litvinenko along with Mr. Lugovoi at London’s Millennium Hotel last November when, according to the British account, Mr. Litvinenko was murdered. During the meeting at the hotel, Mr. Litvinenko drank tea that, his associates have since asserted, was laced with Polonium.

The British move is likely to further strain relations between Britain and Russia, already damaged by Britain’s refusal to extradite Boris Berezovsky, a self-exiled tycoon and foe of the Kremlin who had been Mr. Litvinenko’s employer until mid-2006.

Sir Ken Macdonald, the director of public prosecutions, said the Crown Prosecution Service, an official body which weighs police evidence before prosecutions, had “carefully considered” a police file presented to it in late January after two months of investigations led by Peter Clarke, the head of Britain’s counterterrorism police.

“Among the people of interest to police in this inquiry was a Russian citizen named Andrei Lugovoi,” Sir Ken said in a written statement. Both police and prosecutors, who spoke in return for anonymity under civil service rules, said there had been insufficient evidence to charge Dmitri Kovtun, an associate of Mr. Lugovoi who has told reporters that he met Mr. Litvinenko in November 2006 and on earlier occasions.

Reached by telephone in Moscow, Mr. Kovtun said he was not yet ready to discuss the British move and suggested that he had not been formally advised of the British action. “It’s not clear to us,” he said.

Mr. Kovtun’s name had also cropped up in previous and unconfirmed British news accounts of the police investigation. Both Mr. Lugovoi and Mr. Kovtun have denied murdering Mr. Litvinenko.

Sir Ken’s statement continued: “I have today concluded that the evidence sent to us by the police is sufficient to charge Andrei Lugovoi with the murder of Mr. Litvinenko by deliberate poisoning. I have further concluded that a prosecution of this case would clearly be in the public interest.”

“In those circumstances, I have instructed Crown Prosecution Service lawyers to take immediate steps to seek the early extradition of Andrei Lugovoi from Russia to the United Kingdom, so that he may be charged with murder — and be brought swiftly before a court in London to be prosecuted for this extraordinarily grave crime,” the statement said.

News reports in London said Russia had immediately ruled out extraditing Mr. Lugovoi.

But British officials showed an unusual alacrity in demanding that Russia cooperate with the demand.

Margaret Beckett, the British Foreign Secretary, who had denied earlier newspaper reports suggesting she wanted the case dropped, called the Russian ambassador, Yuri Fedotov, to the Foreign Office today. Afterwards, she said in a statement: “This was a serious crime. We are seeking and we expect full cooperation from the Russian authorities in bringing the perpetrator to face British justice. These points were made strongly to the Russian Ambassador when he was called to the Foreign Office today.”

Mr. Clarke, the counterterrorism commander, called the Litvinenko case a “unique inquiry which has presented a number of complex challenges including the discovery of a radioactive substance at a number of locations.”

On his deathbed, Mr. Litvinenko accused President Vladimir Putin of Russia of being behind his murder, but the Kremlin dismissed the accusation.

Mr. Lugovoi had known Mr. Litvinenko for several years. Both had worked in different sections of the Soviet-era K.G.B.. Mr. Lugovoi had been a K.G.B. bodyguard while Mr. Litvinenko reached the rank of lieutenant colonel as an interrogator in Chechnya and an investigator of organized crime in Moscow for the FSB, the K.G.B.’s post-Soviet domestic successor.

Both men had also worked in separate capacities for Mr. Berezovky in the 1990s before Mr. Litvinenko and his family fled Russia in 2000 and subsequently secured asylum and British citizenship. At the time Mr. Litvinenko died, the two men along with Mr. Kovtun had been seeking work as consultants with specialist British security companies.

In a statement today, Marina Litvinenko, Mr. Litvinenko’s widow, said: “I would like to thank the police and the Crown Prosecution Service for all their hard work in investigating the murder of my husband.”

“It is thanks to them that we have reached the point today of having a named person to be charged with this crime,” she said. “I am now very anxious to see that justice is really done and that Mr. Lugovoi is extradited and brought to trial in a UK court.”

Later today, she was to meet with the Russian ambassador in London, under an arrangement made before today’s announcement. The purpose of that encounter was not immediately clear.

Mr. Berezovsky, once one of Russia’s richest and most powerful men under President Boris Yeltsin, offered no immediate comment on the development.

In his later years, Mr. Litvinenko had become a vitriolic critic of Mr. Putin and his leadership in the Kremlin, accusing the Russian secret service, for instance, of orchestrating a series of apartment bombings in 1999 in Moscow, blamed on Chechen terrorists, to build domestic Russian support for the second Chechen war.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting to this article from Moscow.

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