Detectives investigating the murder of Alexander Litvin-enko are trying to trace a Russian businessman who flew to Britain at the same time as a consignment of deadly polonium-210 was allegedly smuggled into London.

The man was spotted on a flight from Hamburg sitting beside Dimtri Kovtun, another Russian whom German police are investigating for trafficking the radioactive material used to poison the former KGB spy.

Officers have studied CCTV footage from airports at Hamburg and London and are understood to believe that the two men were travelling together. However, the mystery figure disappeared after leaving Heathrow with Mr Kovtun. The name he used on the flight and the passport presented to immigration officials does not show up on any hotel register in the capital. It is believed that he met up again with Mr Kovtun in London on November 1, the day Litvinenko fell ill.

Mr Kovtun was one of the last people to see Litvinenko before he collapsed. Scotland Yard will not say if it regards Mr Kovtun as a victim, a witness or a suspect. (more…)

Russia is the only country in the world capable of averting the “nuclear holocaust” that a confrontation between Iran and Israel could bring about, Russian Jewish Congress head Vyacheslav Kantor said Wednesday, news agency RIA-Novosti reported.

“Everyone understands wonderfully that Israel posseses nuclear weapons, while Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but already has the means to deliver them, and needs about two years before it will be in full possession of them,” Kantor said.

“And today, Russia is the only country that has the unique ability to speak with all parties in the potential future conflicts that are still possible to avoid. That is Russia’s historic mission,” Kantor said. (more…)

Russian authorities pulled hundreds of opposition activists off buses and trains and detained them along with scores of others on Saturday ahead of a rare anti-government rally in Moscow, organizers said.

The police action did not prevent more than 2,000 people from gathering in a central square, where leftist and liberal groups demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin stop what they called Russia’s retreat from democracy.

“In 15 months political power will be changed,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister who is now an opposition leader, referring to the March 2008 presidential election.

“Next year everyone should make a personal decision about what to do with our country _ whether we allow these people to continue their illegal undertakings … or we finally make our main goal to build a democratic and socially oriented state,” Kasyanov told demonstrators. (more…)

Dose ten times the lethal level, Investigators are baffled by amount

British investigators believe that Alexander Litvinenko’s killers used more than $10 million of polonium-210 to poison him. Preliminary findings from the post mortem examination on the former KGB spy suggest that he was given more than ten times the lethal dose.
Police do not know why the assassins used so much of the polonium-210, and are investigating whether the poison was part of a consignment to be sold on the black market.

They believe that whoever orchestrated the plot knew of its effects, but are unsure whether the massive amount was used to send a message — it made it easier for British scientists to detect — or is evidence of a clumsy operation. (more…)

British detectives probing the murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko have wound up their investigation in Moscow and are due to leave for home on Tuesday, a British police source said on Monday.

No details of what the Scotland Yard investigators had discovered were available.

Earlier, Russian agency Interfax, quoting what is said was an informed source, reported that the investigators had interviewed six people including Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy, who met Litvinenko in London on November 1, the day he fell ill with radiation poisoning. (more…)

Father says dissident’s death was ‘a calculated act of intimidation’

The father of the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko has accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering his murder, claiming that no one else in Russia would have the authority to sanction an assassination on foreign soil.

In his first interview since his son’s death, Walter Litvinenko, who served as a doctor in the Gulag during the Communist years, said he was convinced that Alexander was poisoned by the FSB - the successor to the KGB. “The cynical murder of my son was a calculated act of intimidation,” he said. “I have no doubt that he was killed by the FSB, and that the order came from that former KGB spy President Putin. He was the only person who could give that order. I haven’t a shadow of a doubt that this was done by Putin’s men.” (more…)

Russia will replace single nuclear warheads on some of its strategic missiles with multiple warheads, The Associated Press reported Friday citing Russian news agencies.

“In the near future we will begin to substitute the single warheads on Topol-M intercontinental missiles with multiple warheads,” the Interfax-Military News Agency quoted Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, as saying Friday.

Fitting multiple warheads to one-warhead Topol-Ms is a cheaper way for Russia to upgrade its nuclear arsenals and maintain nuclear parity with the United States. (more…)

Four out of five political leaders and state administrators in Russia either have been or still are members of the security services, a study suggests.

The unprecedented research implies a huge expansion of KGB-FSB influence in politics and business in recent years.

Many of the officials concerned have been appointed under President Vladimir Putin - himself a former spy chief.

This has led many liberal commentators to claim their influence is growing unchecked, and threatening democracy. (more…)

Moscow plans on delivering fuel in March for Iran’s first atomic power plant amid heightened international debate over Tehran’s nuclear program, Russian state monopoly Atomstroiexport told Russian news agencies Tuesday.

“We plan to launch preliminary work in January to deliver fuel in March,” Sergei Shmatko, head of Atomstroiexport, was quoted by the Ria Novosti agency as saying.

Shmatko said the nuclear fuel would be delivered on schedule to the southern plant of Bushehr, six months before its expected opening in September 2007. (more…)

Continued coverage of the Litvinenko Murder

Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-KGB/FBS officer who was recently murdered in London, was working for a British security firm at the time of his death, two well placed British sources who wish to remain unidentified tell RAW STORY.

One of the 12 to 24 polonium contamination sites in the Piccadilly area of London identified by British authorities was the office of the security and risk management company Erinys International Ltd.

Erinys has been a player in international relations since it was founded in 2002 by Sean Cleary, a South African Apartheid-era official with ties to Angolan right wing extremist Jonas Savimbi, and Jonathan Garratt, a former British Guards officer. Cleary left the firm in October 2003. Garratt, for his part, has strong ties to Ahmed Chalabi, the notorious source of Iraq pre-war WMD fabrications, and managed to land Erinys an $86 million dollar contract to guard Iraqi oil pipelines after US-led forces began war with Iraq. (more…)

Russian prosecutors investigating the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy, want to travel to London to question a billionaire Russian exile and a Chechen associate.

The move is likely to further strain relations between Russia and Britain, which have been undermined by allegations that the FSB, the former KGB, might be involved in the killing. Russian authorities are also suspected of disrupting the BBC Russian service’s coverage of the murder.

The Russian investigators’ targets are Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire businessman who employed Litvinenko and is a long-standing critic of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen exile the Russians have wanted to extradite on terrorism charges, which he denies.

“There is no doubt that we will demand to question Berezovsky and Zakayev,” said a source close to the Moscow inquiry. “They both knew Litvinenko and could hold vital information.” (more…)

The Kremlin has launched an aggressive public relations war designed to undo the damage caused by its claimed involvement in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

After five weeks of allegations that the poisoning of the former KGB agent was sanctioned by President Vladimir Putin, state-controlled media in Moscow made a concerted attack on Mr Litvinenko’s reputation ­ describing him as a hard-up fantasist whose death was part of a smear campaign against Russia.

The onslaught represented a reversal of the initial silence from the Russian media and senior officials about his death. (more…)

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.” (more…)

Topics discussed, the Litvinenko murder, 9/11 and 7/7.

Source: Cremation Of Care

Former Russian premier Yegor Gaidar thinks the strange illness he caught while in Dublin last month may be a try by enemies of the Kremlin to kill him, Reuters news agency reported Thursday.

The symptoms of a mysterious illness that maid him bleeding from the nose and mouth pointed to poisoning, he said.

He collapsed at an Irish university conference on Nov. 24, the day after former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko, a Kremlin critic, died in a London hospital from radiation poisoning.

Gaidar was found bleeding from the nose and throwing up, pale and unconscious at the moment. He said that had begun to feel unwell after eating a simple breakfast of fruit and a cup of tea. (more…)