The man accused of murdering Alexander Litvinenko has used the first anniversary of his poisoning to suggest that the dissident spy may have killed himself.

Andrei Lugovoy insisted yesterday that he had not exposed Litvinenko to a fatal dose of radioactive polonium-210 at their fateful meeting last November in a London hotel.

Mr Lugovoy and his business partner, Dmitri Kovtun, used a press conference in Moscow to claim that Litvinenko may have been dabbling in a nuclear black market while on the payroll of MI6, the British Secret Service. Mr Kovtun was with Mr Lugovoy for a business meeting with Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel in London. The pair, who insist that they are innocent, had also met the former Federal Security Service (FSB) agent two weeks earlier, on October 16.

Mr Kovtun, who appears to have aged considerably in the past year, said that doctors had found “a rather large amount of polonium” in his body after Litvinenko’s death. He claimed that the whole episode could have been an unfortunate accident.

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BACKGROUND

• Lies and the spies: I must have justice

• Shadowy ex-KGB major takes cover

• Of course the Russians did it. They’re the experts

• The Litvinenko File

• Litvinenko was told that he was marked for death

Related Links

• Russia hits back over spy death

• Spy chief says MI6 tried to destabilise Russia

• Poison suspect turns to politics

“It’s perfectly possible that his death was just an unfortunate accident – and Britain’s MI6 intelligence service found itself in a ridiculous situation,” Mr Kovtun said. Mr Lugovoy added: “This is a serious possibility that needs checking. What if Litvinenko grew careless with polonium? How was his former boss [in MI6] supposed to explain his death?”

Mr Lugovoy accused Litvinenko of being a paid MI6 agent and said that Scotland Yard was ignoring evidence that contradicted the case against him. He insisted that there had been no trace of polonium210 on an aircraft that had brought him and Mr Kovtun to London for the October meeting.

But traces were found in the office where they had met Litvinenko and on their seats in the plane that brought them back. Mr Lugovoy claimed that this demonstrated that the polonium-210 had originated in Britain and not Russia, as Scotland Yard claimed. “We wanted British police to pay attention to this, as the traces lead not from Russia to Britain but vice versa,” he said.

A Sim card in a mobile telephone handed to him by Litvinenko as part of an alleged MI6 attempt to recruit him had also tested positive for polonium-210. “There has always been the invisible presence of the British MI6 around this scandal and they will do everything to mislead the investigation,” Mr Lugovoy said.

“They can jump up and down as much as they want and scream that the British justice system is the best in the world, but whenever the British spy agency is involved there can be no talk of objectivity and justice.”

Litvinenko’s grieving widow, Marina, marked the anniversary with a fresh attack on President Putin. She said he had used the full power of the Russian state to shield her husband’s alleged killer from justice. Mr Lugovoy, who was accused of murder formally by the Crown Prosecution Service in May, had been turned into a national hero in Russia, she said.

Mr Putin rejected an extradition request from Britain, citing a constitutional ban, and dismissed the British case as stupid. Mr Lugovoy is now running for a seat in the Duma.

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