Putin implicated in fatal poisoning of former KGB officer at London hotel

[Litvinenko’s dying words: “A price” will be paid for silencing me]

By Griff Witte and Michael Birnbaum-January 21 at 3:12 PM

LONDON — Gaunt and frail, his organs succumbing to the cruelly destructive power of radioactive poisoning, Alexander Litvinenko lay in a London hospital bed in November 2006 and identified the man responsible for his impending demise: Vladimir Putin.

Nearly a decade later, an exhaustive inquiry by a British judge concluded on Thursday that the dying former KGB operative was probably right. For the first time, the Russian president was officially implicated in a murder that seemed plucked from the pages of a Cold War spy novel, but actually played out in the bar of a posh hotel in 21st century London.

The victim: an outspoken Kremlin critic who had defected to Britain, joined the payroll of British intelligence and accused Putin of vices ranging from corruption to pedophilia. The killers: a pair of assassins who, the report found, were almost certainly acting on orders from the Russian spy service, the FSB, and who left a trail of radioactive evidence strewn across London. The weapons of choice: one tea cup, and one massive dose of a rare nuclear isotope, polonium.

The conclusions instantly set off a furious diplomatic row, with British and Russian officials accusing each other of treachery and deceit. British Prime Minister David Cameron called the findings of “state-sponsored” murder in his capital city “absolutely appalling." A Kremlin spokesman, without apparent irony, said the report would “further poison the atmosphere.”  
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