UK experts to visit Russia again on Litvinenko case - Chaika
16/01/2007 13:19
MOSCOW, January 16 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's top prosecutors have received a request from British investigators to visit the country again to probe the murder of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, the prosecutor general said Tuesday.
"We have received a request from our British colleagues, who want to travel to Russia again to conduct a number of investigative inquiries on the Litvinenko case," Yury Chaika said.
He also said Russian investigators are expected to head for the UK in the near future, adding that they intend to question fugitive oligarch Boris Berezovsky, exclusively on the Litvinenko case.
Berezovsky, who lives in the UK, is wanted in Russia on charges of fraud and attempts to organize a coup.
Litvinenko, an outspoken Kremlin critic with close ties to Berezovsky, defected in 2000 and received a British passport shortly before his death in London in November. Doctors said traces of radioactive polonium-210 were found in his body.
Detectives from Scotland Yard and the Russian Prosecutor General's Office have been investigating the case in London and Moscow, where key witnesses, agents-turned-businessmen Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, are based.
The two men met with Litvinenko in a London hotel shortly before he was hospitalized with symptoms of poisoning, and have themselves undergone radiation checks. Both have denied any involvement in Litvinenko's death.
Police in Germany found traces of polonium-210 in several locations in Hamburg where Kovtun's former wife and mother-in-law live.
Before his death, Litvinenko accused the Kremlin of orchestrating his poisoning in a deathbed note, a charge that President Vladimir Putin strongly denied.
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