CHILDREN of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence agent poisoned in London, have attacked plans to turn his life and death into a Hollywood blockbuster.

Johnny Depp, the actor, has been lined up by Warner Brothers, while rival movies are being planned by Columbia Pictures and at least one other studio.

Alexander, 22, and Sonya, 15, Litvinenko’s son and daughter from his first marriage, are both angry about the “commercialisation” of their father’s memory.

Alexander said: “Any Hollywood film [about my father] will just trivialise his story and turn it into entertainment. I find it extraordinary that no one has asked us our opinion about this. We are his children after all. We too have rights.”

The family were speaking as Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian billionaire and friend of Litvinenko, said he had been warned of a plot by Russian agents to kill him and a fellow Kremlin critic in London.

Speaking from his heavily guarded home on the private Wentworth estate in Surrey last week, Berezovsky said he learnt about the plan by the Russian intelligence service, the FSB, to murder him and the Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev in a tip-off this month.

“I got information from my friend who is based in Israel about a week ago. He telephoned me especially to inform me that he had got information from Moscow that [the] FSB plan a special plot to organise how to kill us, me and Zakayev,” he said. “He told me that I take it [seriously] because according to his information it was serious.”

Litvinenko’s first family said they had been forgotten. “No one bothered to tell us he had been poisoned,” said a tearful Sonya, who during the past six years visited her father four times in the UK. “I heard about it from the news. I tried calling him but couldn’t get through. I heard my dad had died from the TV.”

Sonya, who is at school, and Alexander, who works in a car dealership for £250 a month, live modestly in a Soviet-era apartment block in north Moscow. They share a three-bed-room flat with their grandpar-ents and their mother, who works as an accountant for little more than £100 a month.

Litvinenko walked out of the family home after falling in love with Marina, who became his second wife. Sonya was a toddler and Alexander was seven.

Poring over photo albums of the couple in happier times, Natalia, 43, recalled how she was eight when she met Litvinenko, who was her brother’s best school friend. “It was our first love,” she recalled.

Natalia was only 18 and Litvinenko 19 when they married against her parents’ will. In 1986, aged 24, he was recruited by the KGB, a prestigious career move in Soviet times.

“Sasha had always dreamt of joining the KGB,” said Natalia. “He saw himself as a true patriot and we were all very proud. He was ambitious and it was not long before his career took off. He loved it.”

Natalia described Litvinenko as a man incapable of keeping a secret. She had been “baffled and shocked” when, in late 1998, he claimed to have been ordered to assassinate Berezovsky.

His first family reject his western image as a champion of democracy who sought to expose the evils of the FSB before his death last November.

“One’s first motherland is one’s family,” said Natalia. “Sasha betrayed his family, then the FSB, then his country, then his religion. But this does not change the fact that his death isa terrible tragedy and that we love him deeply.”

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