Russia was responsible for the 2006 death of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned with radioactive Polonium, European judges have ruled.
Litvinenko, a prominent critic of the Kremlin, died aged 43 in London after drinking green tea laced with Polonium 210 at the plush Millennium Hotel in Mayfair.
Britain has long blamed the attack on Russia – straining relations between the two nations – and the European Court of Human Rights has now agreed.
‘Russia was responsible for the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in the UK,’ a ruling issued from the Strasbourg court said on Tuesday.
Judges also ruled that Andrei Lugovoi – a former KGB agent – and Dmitry Kovtun, who had met with Litvinenko at the hotel, were the poisoners.
Alexander Litvinenko is pictured at the Intensive Care Unit of University College Hospital on November 20, 2006 in London. He died three days later
Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, 43, (pictured in 2002) died weeks after drinking green tea laced with polonium-210 at London’s plush Millennium hotel in an attack Britain has long blamed on Moscow
The court – which rules on whether states have breached the European Convention on Human Rights – was responding to a complaint brought by Marina Litvinenko, Alexander’s widow.
Ms Litvinenko had submitted the complaint in November last year, claiming £3million in punitive damages and lost income over her husband’s death.
She also asked the court to rule on a pattern of targeted assassinations in Europe and the Middle East – including the UK attack on Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia – which have been blamed on Russia.
It was not immediately clear whether the court would be ruling on those matters, or where the Litvinenko ruling leaves Ms Litvinenko’s compensation claim.
Ms Litvinenko had brought her case before the ECHR once before, in 2007, when it was suspended because a public inquiry was underway in the UK.
At the time her legal team was being led by Kier Starmer, now Labour Party leader.
Litvinenko was born in 1962 in the Soviet Union, in the city of Voronezh which is 290 miles south of Moscow.
After a short stint as a platoon commander for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Litvinenko was recruited into the KGB as a military counter-intelligence officer.
He continued to work at the agency after it was transformed into the modern-day FSB and rose to the rank of senior operational officer in a unit responsible for tackling organised crime. He also served for a time as Boris Berezovsky’s bodyguard.
In 1998, Litvinenko fell out with FSB leadership when he backed Berezovsky who had accused senior FSB officers of ordering his assassination.
He was subsequently dismissed from the organisation, arrested, and twice appeared in court on charges of exceeding his authority – but saw both cases quashed.
Fearing for his life, Litvinenko fled to London in 2000 with second wife Marina and was granted asylum in London. He then moved to Boston, Lincolnshire, where he worked as a journalist, author and consultant for British intelligence.
During this time he wrote two books accusing the Russian state of staging apartment bombings and other terror acts to bring Putin to power. He also coined the phrase ‘mafia state’.
In October 2006, he also accused the Kremlin of being behind the death of journalist Anna Politkovskaya – another prominent Kremlin critic who was fatally shot in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow.
Just a few weeks later, Litvinenko fell suddenly ill after meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun at the Millennium Hotel to drink tea.
Three days later, Litvinenko took himself to hospital in Barnet before being transferred to University College Hospital as his condition worsened.
Former KGB bodyguard Andrei Lugovoy and another Russian, Dmitry Kovtun, carried out the killing as part of an operation probably directed by Russia’s Federal Security Service
He died in intensive care on November 23, more than three weeks after the initial poisoning and three days after the now-infamous photo of him lying in bed without hair was released to the media.
The day after his death, friend Alex Goldfarb read a statement that Litvinenko dictated in which he blamed Vladimir Putin directly for his killing.
Russia has always denied any involvement in Litvinenko’s death, which plunged Anglo-Russian relations to a post-Cold War low.
A lengthy British inquiry concluded in 2016 that Russian President Vladimir Putin probably approved a Russian intelligence operation to murder Litvinenko.
It also found that former KGB bodyguard Andrei Lugovoy and another Russian, Dmitry Kovtun, carried out the killing as part of an operation probably directed by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
Responding to a complaint brought by Litvinenko’s widow Marina, the ECHR agreed. Both men have always denied involvement.
‘The court found it established, beyond reasonable doubt, that the assassination had been carried out by Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun,’ the ruling said.
The pair had travelled to the British capital with the aim of killing him, the court found.
‘The planned and complex operation involving the procurement of a rare deadly poison, the travel arrangements for the pair, and repeated and sustained attempts to administer the poison indicated that Mr Litvinenko had been the target of the operation.’
It added that that there was also a ‘strong prima facie case that, in killing Mr Litvinenko, Mr Lugovoi and Mr Kovtun had been acting on the direction or control of the Russian authorities.’
The court concluded that the Russian state was to blame and that had the men been carrying out a ‘rogue operation’, Moscow would have the information to prove that theory.
‘However, the government had made no serious attempt to provide such information or to counter the findings of the UK authorities,’ the ruling said.
The court thus found ‘that Mr Litvinenko’s assassination was imputable to Russia,’ it said.
Critics of the Kremlin see the Litvinenko killing as one in a line of assassination plots ordered by Russia, including the attempted poisonings of former agent Sergei Skripal in Britain in 2018 and opposition leader Alexei Navanly in Siberia in 2020. The Kremlin denies the charges.