On the day he was poisoned, Alexander Litvinenko was shown a hit list of Kremlin targets that included his own name, it emerged last night.

An Italian security expert who met Mr Litvinenko in a London restaurant on November 1 said yesterday that both men were on the list, with other exiled Russians living in Britain.

Mario Scaramella revealed that he had turned to the former KGB spy for help.

They met at their usual rendezvous, in a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly, to study the list. Mr Litvinenko, 43, promised to investigate the threats but before the pair could discuss the list further he complained of feeling violently unwell.

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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

He did not at first suspect he had been poisoned.

Last night as Scotland Yard anti-terror detectives began compiling a list of suspects they want to question, doctors at University College Hospital, where he is in a serious condition, admitted that the precise cause of his illness may never be known.

Toxicologists said that it appeared he was given a cocktail of drugs, which may have included a radioactive form of thallium.

Amit Nathwani said that Mr Litvinenko was “seriously ill but stable” and would undergo further tests today to try to discover the exact combination of toxins. Mr Litvinenko is expected to need a bone marrow transplant.

One of Mr Litvinenko’s closest friends, Alex Goldfarb, who saw him yesterday, said: “He looks like he is slowly deteriorating.” He said his friend was more exhausted, had lost more weight and spoke with more difficulty.

The former spy, who arrived in Britain in 2001 claiming asylum and was granted British citizenship this year, was too ill to speak to detectives yesterday. Six uniformed officers remain guarding the hospital’s intensive care ward.

As speculation intensified over who was behind the Cold War-style murder attempt, Russian authorities said that British police were welcome to visit Moscow and question anyone they want.

A senior Russian diplomat told The Times: “It is in the Kremlin’s interests to offer full co-operation with British police in trying to find the would-be assassin. This was not some official hit as so much of the British press would have it, so let us investigate this thoroughly wherever it takes us. The finger has been pointed at us so let us find who was truly responsible.”

The Times has also been told that two Russians met Mr Litvinenko at a London hotel early on November 1. One of them is Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB colleague of Mr Litvinenko, who now provides security for some of Russia’s richest men. He was said to have been seen in London about a week before the alleged murder attempt and is then thought to have met Mr Litvinenko for “a cup of tea” with another Russian known only as Vladimir.

Police also want to question Dr Scaramella, who emerged from hiding in Rome yesterday to reveal how he was involved in a secret investigation with Mr Litvinenko into Russian death squads believed to be operating abroad.

British detectives are investigating whether telephone calls between the two men arranging their lunch were bugged.

Dr Scaramella told how Mr Litvinenko had helped to foil an assassination attempt this year on Paolo Guzzanti, an Italian senator who headed an official parliamentary investigation into KGB activity in Italy. Dr Scaramella said that Mr Litvinenko’s intervention helped police to arrest six Ukrainians.

Looking nervous and exhausted, Dr Scaramella described his half-hour meeting with Mr Litvinenko. “We had already met several times there. There were no other customers at the time. He got some food from the self-service, a sort of refrigerator bar. He got some soup and we went downstairs to speak.” The pair studied four pages of text that had come in two e-mails from “a mutual source” in Russia. “It was full of names and facts,” he said, adding that both men doubted the authenticity of some of the material.

Both men had previously received e-mail threats.

Dr Scaramella told how he also passed on details of the alleged identities of the murderers of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was an outspoken critic of President Putin. He said that a group of men from St Petersburg were suspected of killing her last month.

Dr Scaramella said that he was ready to co-operate fully with the police investigation.

'I felt sick'

Extracts from Mr Litvinenko’s own account of his poisoning were released yesterday from an interview that he gave to the BBC’s Russian Service on November 10.

Speaking from his hospital bed he explained how he was asked for a meeting about the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Mr Litvinenko described how his contact “passed me some papers, where the person was named, who apparently might be connected to the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. That’s it. After several hours I felt sick with symptoms of poisoning.

“When I feel better, when I am back home, I will pass these papers to Novaya Gazeta [the paper at which Politkovskaya worked]. To police and to Novaya Gazeta — that’s all.

“I don’t know whether they [the poisoning and the meeting] are connected. I guess you can make your own conclusion on this.

“The documents are in English. I did not even manage to study them properly because when I was home I felt sick in just a few hours.”

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