MI6 killed Litvinenko, says Russian suspect

MOSCOW: The chief suspect in the murder of Russian ex-agent Alexander Litvinenko on Thursday accused the British secret service of being behind the killing and said Litvinenko himself had been spying for MI6.   

Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB agent whom Britain has charged with the London murder, spun a tale of intrigue and espionage during a media conference in Moscow that only deepened the mysteries surrounding the most lurid spy tale since the Cold War.   

The radiation poisoning of Litvinenko last November "couldn't have taken place outside the control of Great Britain's special services," he said at the conference broadcast live on state-run television.   

Asked whether there was evidence of their direct involvement in the murder, Lugovoi said: "There is".   

Though he would give no details, the charge was likely to send already chilly relations between Moscow and London to a new low.   

A British Foreign Office spokesman gave a terse response to Lugovoi's charges, saying: "This is a criminal matter and not an issue about intelligence."   

Speaking in Paris, Litvinenko's widow Marina rejected the new accusations as "disinformation and provocation".   

The murder in November was a catalogue of political scandal: Litvinenko was a political asylum seeker-turned British citizen who was killed on British soil. He was poisoned with a radioactive isotope in what some commentators called the world's first act of nuclear terrorism.   

The sensitivity of the case -- and its role in Russia's deteriorating relations with much of the West -- were reflected when Washington threw its weight behind Britain's push to extradite Lugovoi.   

Russia's FSB secret services told AFP they would carry out a legal analysis of comments by Lugovoi relating to "possible damage to the security of the Russian Federation".   

Lugovoi, who came to the conference with a detail of hulking bodyguards, said that either Britain's MI6 intelligence agency, the Russian mafia, or fugitive Kremlin opponent Boris Berezovsky had carried out the killing.   

"The main role," he said, "is played by the British special services and their agents".   

He suggested a motive by claiming that both Berezovsky and Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence agent turned critic of President Vladimir Putin, were working for MI6.   

"It is hard to escape the thought that Litvinenko had become an agent who had escaped the control of the special services and they took him out."   

Lugovoi also claimed MI6 had attempted to recruit him to gather compromising material on Putin and his family, and that Litvinenko had given him a book by a popular Russian author to use for secret communications.   

"He said that now, like in the spy films, we should use a cipher -- code the text by page number, paragraph and line."   

Marina Litvinenko, meanwhile, said Lugovoi's story "contradicts what the Russians have said before".   

She said her husband was "a high-level specialist in the fight against organised crime. He had no secrets".   

In London, Berezovsky dismissed Lugovoi's press conference as a piece of theatre stage-managed by the Russian government. "It is now clearer than ever that the Kremlin is behind the murder of Alexander Litvinenko," the exiled businessman said.

"Everything about Mr Lugovoi's words and presentation made it obvious that he is acting on Kremlin instruction," he added, while denying that he is a British M16 agent.   

Suspicion fell on Lugovoi, together with his associate Dmitry Kovtun, as Britain's probe into the poisoning unfolded late last year.   

Both met with Litvinenko in an upmarket London hotel on November 1, the day Litvinenko fell ill, and both left traces of the radioactive isotope used to poison him in various locations while returning to Russia.   

Litvinenko died in agony 22 days after the meeting.   

British prosecutors charged Lugovoi with the murder last week, though Russia refused to extradite him even before Britain had filed a formal request, saying its constitution forbids the extradition of its citizens.   

Lugovoi and Kovtun, who work together in a private security firm, have consistently denied any wrongdoing in the case.