Litvinenko murdered over damaging file on Russian business partner

LONDON: Ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was murdered over a damaging file he compiled for a British firm about a potential Russian business partner, the BBC said Saturday, citing a Litvinenko associate.   

Yuri Shvets, a former spy who became a business associate of Litvinko, told the BBC he believes Litvinenko was poisoned after his eight-page dossier was deliberately leaked to the unnamed powerful Moscow figure.   

Shvets said the British company, working with Litvinenko through a business risk management firm, wanted the dossier of commercial and political information before it invested millions of pounds in Russia.   

"I cannot really be 100 per cent sure, but I am pretty sure," Shvets, who is based in Washington, told the BBC, which ran the interview on its website and also broadcast it.   

"Obviously there is always room for other suspicions, but in a tradecraft there is such a thing as most probable theory, and this is the one," Shvets said.   

Litvinenko, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, fell ill on November 1 in London, and died November 23 with large quantities of the radioactive substance polonium-210 found in his urine.   

On his deathbed, he accused Putin of being behind the poisoning, but the Kremlin denies any involvement.   

Shvets, who advises on legal and security issues in the former Soviet Union, said Litvinenko had told him from his hospital bed that he was convinced that he was poisoned when he met three Russians at the Millennium Hotel in London.   

"He drank a tea which was not made in front of him. He was agonized by the understanding that as a professional he failed," Shvets said.   

"He was always saying 'I can identify my enemy a mile away'. But in this particular case, when it came to his own life, he failed."    

Shvets said London's Metropolitan Police, who interviewed him, now have the dossier as part of the investigation into Litvinenko's murder. Shvets did not name the British firm for which he compiled the dossier.   

Shvets, who trained at the KGB academy in the same class as Putin, worked for Russian intelligence services between from 1980 to 1990, and was based in Washington from 1985. He emigrated to the United States in 1993.