Britain demands handover of Russian polonium suspect

2007-05-22, Yahoo

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LONDON (Reuters) - British prosecutors accused a former KGB agent on Tuesday of murdering Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and demanded his extradition, putting London and Moscow on a diplomatic collision course.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it wanted to bring suspect Andrei Lugovoy before a British court and charge him with the "extraordinarily grave crime" of murdering exiled Russian Litvinenko in London last November.

Britain's Foreign Office summoned the Russian ambassador and told him in strong terms it expected "full cooperation" over Lugovoy's case but Russia's Prosecutor-General office said the constitution prevented it from extraditing Russian citizens.

"No one should be under any doubt about the seriousness with which we regard this case. Murder is murder," Prime Minister
Tony Blair's spokesman said.

Lugovoy denied the accusation and told the state-owned Itar-Tass: "I consider this decision politically motivated."

The murkiest case of murder and espionage since the Cold War had already strained diplomatic relations with Britain and the extradition move looked certain to aggravate tensions further.

Blair's spokesman stressed Britain had important political and economic ties with Russia. "This doesn't in any way obviate the need for the international rule of law to be respected, and we will not in any way shy away from trying to ensure that happens in a case such as this," he said.

Russian prosecutors said they would give their full attention to any charges against Lugovoy once they had received official documents from Britain, and opened the possibility he could be tried in his homeland.

Ties between Russia and the
European Union are frosty on a range of issues from missile defense to human rights. European energy producers rely on huge oil and gas imports from Russia.

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Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who had become a fierce critic of Russian President
Vladimir Putin in exile, met Lugovoy and another Russian businessman, Dmitry Kovtun, at the Pine Bar of London's Millennium Hotel on November 1 last year.

Within hours, he had fallen severely ill. He suffered an agonizing death over the next three weeks as his organs gradually failed. Images of his emaciated body, hooked up to medical tubes, were published around the world.

Doctors eventually diagnosed poisoning by polonium 210, a highly toxic radioactive isotope.

In a letter dictated on his deathbed, Litvinenko, who had acquired British citizenship weeks before he was poisoned, accused Putin of his murder.

Moscow dismissed the accusation as ridiculous. It has launched its own investigation into Litvinenko's death and denies that its security services played any part.

Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard who later worked as head of security for tycoon Boris Berezovsky, has previously laughed off reports Britain would seek his extradition. He has denied killing Litvinenko and accused British media of demonizing him.

Ken Macdonald, head of the Crown Prosecution Service, said prosecuting him would clearly be in the public interest.

"I have instructed CPS lawyers to take immediate steps to seek the early extradition of Andrei Lugovoy from Russia to the United Kingdom, so that he may be charged with murder -- and be brought swiftly before a court in London to be prosecuted for this extraordinarily grave crime," he said.

A CPS spokeswoman said it would ask the police to obtain an arrest warrant, which would then be sent to Russian authorities.

"The ball is now in the Russians' court," she said. "We can't speculate on what the Russians will do."

Litvinenko's widow Marina said: "I am now very anxious to see that justice is really done and that Mr. Lugovoy is extradited and brought to trial in a UK court."

(Additional reporting by Katherine Baldwin, David Clarke, Adrian Croft and Kate Kelland in London; James Kilner and Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow)