A Russian businessman who met with a former Russian domestic intelligence officer in London the day the man fell ill from radioactive poison has himself become suddenly and seriously sick, Russian news organizations reported Thursday night.

Dmitry Kovtun, a business consultant who met with Alexander Litvinenko on Nov. 1 at a bar in the Millennium Hotel in London, suffered a severe health breakdown from radiation exposure, according to the reports. He had earlier been interviewed by Russian investigators, with detectives from Scotland Yard present as well.

According to the Russian Interfax news agency, Kovtun “has an acute form of radiation sickness, with internal contamination from alpha-radiation by radio-nuclides affecting the liver, the kidneys, and the intestines.”

The investigation of Litvinenko’s mysterious death has widened with each day, as technicians follow a radioactive trail left by the poison polonium-210 across London and Moscow and in the cabins of jetliners that flew between the two cities.

Critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin have accused his government of orchestrating a covert execution of Litvinenko to silence a detractor; the Kremlin rejects those claims as absurd and says Russia only suffers from the burgeoning international publicity over the death. No one has been formally identified as a suspect in the case, which has strained relations between Russia and Britain.

Kovtun is the second person reported seriously sickened by the radiation, though others have tested positive for low-level exposure to the substance. On Thursday, British health officials added seven people to the exposure list — employees in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel on Nov. 1.

The Russian prosecutor’s office, accused in Britain of dragging its feet in the inquiry, said Thursday it has opened its own criminal investigations. “The examination revealed that Litvinenko died after being poisoned with a radioactive nuclide and Kovtun . . . was also found to have been poisoned with a radioactive nuclide,” the prosecutor’s statement said. Opening criminal cases could be the first step in pursuing a prosecution here.

Andrei Lugovoy, another Russian who was present at the London meeting Nov. 1, is undergoing tests at a Moscow clinic. He was to speak with British and Russian investigators Thursday, but the meeting was postponed.

“We are on hold,” Lugovoy’s attorney, Andrei Romashov, said in a brief phone interview. He said his client, a former KGB officer, did not ask for the postponement; Russian news agency RIA Novosti said it was requested by Russian investigators for “technical reasons.”

Romashov said Kovtun’s attorney told him that his client was sick but not in a coma. Russian media, citing medical sources at Kovtun’s hospital, continued to report Thursday night that the businessman had slipped into a coma and was experiencing failure of major organs. Wire services reported Friday that he had awakened, but his health was being closely watched.

Kovtun has said he first met Litvinenko in October to discuss possible business deals with British companies interested in investing in Russia. He described himself in a recent interview as a longtime resident of Germany who had returned to Moscow to set up a business.

He is the latest person to have tested positive for polonium-210 radiation. Litvinenko’s wife, Marina, has been told that small amounts were found in her urine but that risk to her health was low. Mario Scaramella, an Italian who also met with Litvinenko on Nov. 1, in a London sushi restaurant, had more significant amounts of polonium in his system, doctors said, but he is not showing symptoms and was discharged from a London hospital Wednesday.

British officials played down any threat to the seven hotel workers. “There is no health risk in the short term and in the long term the risk is judged to be very small on the basis of initial tests,” Britain’s Health Protection Agency said in a statement.

In another suspected poisoning case, former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar wrote in the Financial Times on Thursday that he believes someone tried to kill him at a conference in Dublin last month. Gaidar became violently ill there, and his daughter immediately raised the specter of poisoning, though Irish police have found no evidence to support that.

“Most likely . . . some obvious or hidden adversaries of the Russian authorities stand behind the scenes of this event, those who are interested in further radical deterioration of relations between Russia and the west,” wrote Gaidar, who now heads a research organization in Moscow.

In London, Litvinenko was buried Thursday at historic Highgate Cemetery, which also includes the grave of Karl Marx, whose writings gave rise to the communist movement. Among those at the grave site was exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky.

The interment followed a memorial service at a central London mosque that was attended by Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen separatist wanted in Russia.

Litvinenko is reported to have converted to Islam on his deathbed. Alex Goldfarb, a friend of the Litvinenko family, said any conversion “is kind of in the eye of the beholder.”

He said Zakayev visited Litvinenko in the hospital just before he died, when he was heavily sedated, and believed that the sick man wanted to convert.

Source: Washington Post