Andrei Lugovoi, a businessman and former KGB officer, during an exclusive interview with Kommersant on November 23, 2006. Lugovoi met with former Russian spy Alexander Livinenko in London on November 1, 2006, the day when Litvinenko was poisoned.
Photo: Alexey Kudenko
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Scotland Yard Visits Moscow Hospital
// Investigators Finally Question Andrei Lugovoi
Yesterday investigators from the Russian General Prosecutor's office, accompanied by representatives of Britain's Scotland Yard, questioned businessman Andrei Lugovoi in his bed in a Moscow hospital. Mr. Lugovoi is the main witness in the case of the recent fatal poisoning of the Russian former spy Alexander Litvinenko in London. Police in Hamburg, Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the affairs of Mr. Lugovoi's business partner and neighbor in the hospital ward, Dmitry Kovtun, who is accused of illegally possessing radioactive materials. The police speculate that Mr. Kovtun brought polonium-210, the same material used to kill Mr. Litvinenko, from Moscow to Hamburg on October 28, 2006.
Lugovoi and Kovtun are in a special hospital run by the Federal Medico-Biological Agency of Russia. The hospital is completely isolated from the outside world: suffice it to say that the hospital's information center refuses to give any information about patients and maintains that the telephone numbers for the hospital were not even in the phone book until a few years ago.
Andrei Lugovoi was questioned in the hospital, where he is undergoing tests whose results will be released on Friday, by investigators from the Russian General Prosecutor's office. The session was attended by representatives of Britain's Scotland Yard who arrived in Moscow on November 6. The investigators questioned Mr. Lugovoi for three hours regarding the circumstances under which he met Alexander Litvinenko, but they were most interested in the final meetings between Lugovoi and Litvinenko in London in October and November of this year.
Mr. Lugovoi refused to discuss the details of the inquest, saying that the Russian investigators had obliged him to sign a statement promising that he would not reveal any information connected with the investigation. "Before I talk about circumstances tied to the investigation, I should check with my lawyer and with the investigators," Mr. Lugovoi told Kommersant, noting that his lawyer, Andrei Romashov, was not present at the questioning. "After all, I'm only a witness, so I didn't need a lawyer."
Last week Russian and British investigators interrogated a friend and business partner of Mr. Lugovoi's named Dmitry Kovtun. He has also landed in the same hospital complaining of radiation sickness, but reports on his health are contradictory: at the end of last week it was reported that Mr. Kovtun had fallen into a coma, but that news was dismissed by Andrei Lugovoi and Mr. Romashov. Mr. Kovtun's condition is now said to be stable.
The London police consider Dmitry Kovtun a witness in the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. For its part, the Russian General Prosecutor's office considers him a victim of attempted murder. Last weekend, however, Hamburg chief public attorney Martin Kenke announced that Dmitry Kovtun, who has a German residency permit, is being charged by the Hamburg police with the illegal possession and mishandling of radioactive materials. According to Mr. Kenke, the German investigators have grounds to believe that Dmitry Kovtun is not only a victim of radiation sickness but also the "poisoner" in the Litvinenko case.
Yesterday a representative of the Hamburg police told Kommersant that "the police currently cannot answer the question of what legal consequences the collected evidence against Mr. Kovtun could lead to." "The investigation has several working versions, but we currently cannot comment on them," said the police spokesman. In general, however, the Hamburg police believe that Dmitry Kovtun transported polonium-210 to Germany from Moscow on October 28. On that day, according to the police report, he flew to Hamburg on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow together with another Russian citizen, whose name has not been disclosed. Mr. Kovtun spent the night of October 28-29 in his ex-wife's apartment on Hertzberger Street, where traces of polonium-210 were found. The next day he bought a pair of pants in one of the stores in the center of Hamburg, leaving traces of radiation behind. He spent the next night in his former mother-in-law's apartment in the Haselau region, where radiation was also discovered.
Police also found traces of polonium-210 left by Mr. Kovtun on the passenger's seats of two cars. On October 30, he visited the local Immigration Bureau and left a radioactive imprint on the document that he signed there, and he also left tracks in a restaurant and a gambling establishment. After staying with a friend for a night, visiting various places in suburban Hamburg, and staying for a second night with his ex-wife, Mr. Kovtun caught a flight to London with the airline company German Wings on the morning of November 1. Later that day Mr. Lugovoi and Mr. Kovtun met in the London Millenium Mayfair Hotel with Mr. Litvinenko, who had emigrated to England for political reasons. During the meeting, Mr. Lugovoi told Kommersant, they discussed prospective business contacts with representatives from the companies Erynis International and RISC Management. Both companies provide risk-management services and the creation of security infrastructures for projects belonging to oil-extraction industries in crisis regions. The United Nations and the United States government both employ Erynis' services.
According to the London police, someone put polonium-210 into the tea that Mr. Litvinenko drank in the Millenium Hotel that day. In testimony given to the police when he was already in the hospital, Mr. Litvinenko suggested that the deed could have been done by the person who was in the bar with Andrei Lugovoi, who introduced himself with the assumed name of Vladimir.
The only part of Mr. Kovtun's whereabouts that the police have not yet succeeded in establishing is whether he returned to Hamburg or flew to Moscow from London. The Hamburg police report that Mr. Kovtun's 31-year-old ex-wife Marina, her 27-year-old live-in boyfriend, and two children (1 and 3 years old, respectively) are ill in a Hamburg hospital with what experts suspect may be radiation poisoning after ingesting a dose of polonium-210.The police emphasize that "such an infection could have come about only after extensive bodily contact with Mr. Kovtun or with polonium-210 itself."
Marina Chistyakova and Nikolai Sergeev
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 12, 2006
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