Clandestine meetings in luxurious London hotels, a pair of slapdash assassins and a small vial filled with one of the most deadly substances on earth. This is the true story of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko 👇
While Alexander – Sasha to his friends – was visibly deteriorating, the 44-year-old refused to be deterred.
‘He basically discovered that the rampant corruption in Russia went all the way to the top of the state, and that his bosses were involved,’ Luke Harding, author of A Very Expensive Poison, which documents the Litvinenko affair, explains to Metro.co.uk. ‘Sasha was one of the first whistle-blowers of the federation in a post-Soviet era.
England’s capital was seen as a safe haven for many Russians, with a sizable community moving to the city. For Sasha, London was a place where he could speak openly and critically about Russia and Putin, who in 2000, had been elected President of the Russian Federation. Receiving a small allowance from Boris, he worked tirelessly to source intelligence that could prove damaging to Putin.
Inside the top pocket of his vibrant outfit was a small vial of clear liquid, which could have easily been dismissed as aftershave. However, it contained polonium 210, one of the deadliest substances on Earth.‘The Russians wanted to make Sasha’s murder splashy and sensational,’ Luke explains. ‘The Kremlin wanted to show other dissidents that not only the Russian state was unforgiving, but they can strike at any time and in the most painful way possible.
A second opportunity arose shortly after the meeting, when the three men headed to a nearby Itsu for sushi. When Sasha did not leave his food unattended, Lugovoy knew he had missed his chance.supports HTML5 video But the trip to London wasn’t over for Lugovoy. After poisoning his business partner, he then went to watch the football, watching Arsenal draw against CSKA Moscow in a nil-nil match, before getting a British Airways flight back to Russia.
It left Peter Clarke, the head of the Counter Terrorism Command, in an unimaginably difficult situation. With London still reeling from the 7/7 bombings that occurred the year before, he and his team were forced to act quickly to ascertain the danger to the nine million people living in the city. The police followed the breadcrumb trail across London and found hugely worrying levels of radiation in public areas visited by thousands on a day-to-day basis. Even Sasha’s wife Marina, who had spent a lot of time by his bedside, was radioactive. Her husband’s body was also a hazard – he had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin as a safety precaution.
‘I’ve always known what this regime is capable of,’ he explains, covering the war extensively in his new book, Invasion. ‘In Autumn last year, when Putin started mobilising troops, many people thought it was a bluff – but I knew it was going to lead to a full-blown invasion. ‘We expelled a few diplomats, and that was it,’ Luke explains. ‘Whenever Putin does something terrible, and receives little response, he doubles down. We saw this after Litvinenko with the 2018 Salisbury poisonings. We saw this after the invasion of Georgia in 2008 with the annexation of Crimea. We’re seeing this with‘Putin absolutely despises the West. His attitude towards the rest of the world is “f*** you.
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