Lugovoi Claims Brits Killed Litvinenko

The man Britain has charged with killing former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko says that British Intelligence is behind the poisoning. At a dramatic news conference yesterday, Andrei Lugovoi, also former KGB, claimed that Litvinenko was a British agent who was killed by his handlers. And he accused Boris Berezovsky, a Russian expat critical of Putin, of being complicit.

Lugovoi said he, too, had been recruited by Birtish intelligence to help in a campaign to discrdit Putin, and he was now being scapegoated as "a kind of Russian James Bondwho climbs inside a nuclear reactor and then poisons his Russian friend." Litvinenko died of exposure to the radioactive isotope polonium-210. Berezovsky said Lugovoi's claims smack of Kremlin orchestration. (More Alexander Litvinenko stories.)