Police Trace Last Steps of Poisoned Ex-KGB Spy

Nov. 25, 2006 — -- One by one, police are retracing the last steps of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB spy turned Kremlin critic who officials determined was fatally poisoned by a rare radioactive substance.

Police are carefully testing all the places and people he came into contact with after his poisoning with radioactive polonium 210 -- his home, the hospital where he died, the sushi restaurant where a friend warned him his life was in danger.

When doctors announced Friday they had detected polonium 210 in his body, they said the chances that others might have been affected was minimal. But today, the head of Britain's Health Protection Agency raised the possibility of a wider contamination.

"The vast majority of people will not have received a significant dose -- a significant exposure -- to polonium 210," said Roger Cox, Director of the Health Protection Agency. "But on the other hand, it's possible that a small number might have."

For now, the HPA is focusing only on people who visited the locations the same day as Litvinenko. For the sushi restaurant, a branch of the Itsu chain on Piccadilly, for instance, that means only customers who ate there on Nov. 1.

''What we're trying to do is to identify people at most risk, even though the risk is tiny, the ones that are at perhaps slightly higher risk," said Dr. Jill Meara, deputy director of the Health Protection Agency. "Then, we can test and reassure them and make a decision in the next days and weeks about other people."

The challenge for investigators is that after he was poisoned, Litvenenko appears to have left tiny traces of radiation virtually wherever he went.

One location is London's Millennium Hotel, just down the street from the U.S. embassy. On Nov. 1, Litvinenko met two Russian men there, including another former KGB agent. Police have now sealed off the room where one of the men was staying. They are also asking anyone who was in the hotel bar that night to come forward. Still, police have no hard evidence this was where the poisoning took place.

What investigators do know is this: Whoever poisoned Litvinenko would need expertise to deliver the correct dose and access to sophisticated nuclear facilities.

"[Polonium 210] is artificially synthesized, and there are very few labs in the world who can do it," said Dr. Andrea Fella of University College, London. "This is not one of your in-the-kitchen-bathtub-kind of productions. This is something which requires some serious resources behind it. It really is a heavy-duty nuclear physics."

That, say Litvinenko's friends, confirms their suspicions, shared by Litvinenko himself, that his former employers, the Russian security services, were behind his poisoning.

Andrei Nekrasov, a friend of Litvinenko's who met with him days before he died, said Litvinenko pointed the finger at his former colleagues, calling them "bastards, bastards."

"He meant his former colleagues," Nekrasov said. "And he was quite blunt about Putin himself."

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the allegation politically motivated, but British police are now asking for Russian help.

And today, the British government again called a high-level meeting of its most senior ministers -- a group codenamed COBRA -- to discuss the case.