Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Poisoned Russian spy buried in London

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published December 8, 2006

LONDON - After a Muslim prayer service, ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko was laid to rest Thursday in a rain-swept funeral at London's Highgate Cemetery attended by a Russian tycoon, a Chechen rebel leader and other exiled Kremlin critics.

In Moscow, Russian prosecutors opened their own investigation into the former KGB agent's poisoning death, and authorities said a key figure was ill with symptoms related to polonium-210, the highly radioactive substance that killed Litvinenko.

Self-exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky, Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev and some 50 mourners consoled Litvinenko's widow, Marina, and 12-year-old son, Anatoly, at the funeral.

A single white rose was placed on his rain-splattered dark oak casket.

Lord John Rea, director of the Save Chechnya campaign, held up a picture of crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose murder Litvinenko was investigating at the time of his fatal poisoning.

Scotland Yard on Wednesday said it was investigating his death as a homicide, and traces of radiation have been found at more than a dozen sites in Britain and on jetliners that flew between London and Moscow.

As the investigations proceeded in both London and Moscow, Britain's Health Protection Agency said seven workers at the Millennium Hotel, where Litvinenko met two Russians on the day he fell ill, have tested positive for "low levels" of polonium.

The agency said there was no risk to their health in the short term and little danger for the public.

The opening of a criminal case in Moscow would allow suspects in the Litvinenko case to be prosecuted in Russia. Officials there previously have said that Russia would not allow the extradition of any suspects in the death.

In the latest twist in the case, Russian officials said Dmitry Kovtun, a former agent who had met with Litvinenko on the day he fell fatally ill, has developed an illness connected with polonium-210.

The Russian news agency Interfax reported that Kovtun was in critical condition in a coma, but a lawyer connected to the case, Andrei Romashov, denied that.

Kovtun was questioned this week by Russian investigators and Scotland Yard detectives in Moscow, although it was not immediately clear if he was considered a witness or a potential suspect.

[Last modified December 8, 2006, 00:22:13]