Mario Scaramella, the Italian self-styled defence consultant who was with Alexander Litvinenko when he ate at a London sushi bar, fears that he too may have been poisoned by radiation and wants to visit London for medical tests.

Mr Scaramella, who is in hiding, said yesterday that he was not seeking police protection. But he added that he believed he was a potential target.

He told Corriere della Sera that Mr Litvinenko had been killed because he “knew too much”, and those such as himself who had “secret knowledge” were also in danger. He added that he had no doubt that the Kremlin was behind the death of Mr Litvinenko.

He said that at the sushi bar he had shown Mr Litvinenko a list of people that the FSB, the KGB’s successor, was targeting, including Mr Litvinenko.

Others on the list included Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch, Paolo Guzzanti, an Italian senator who headed the Mitrokhin Commission, an official parliamentary investigation into KGB activity in Italy during the Cold War, and Mr Scaramella.

Mr Scaramella also claimed that Moscow had tried to kill him before, by using Camorra (Naples Mafia) hitmen, and that he had helped to foil an attempt on the life of Mr Guzzanti by Ukrainian agents, who smuggled grenades into Italy in bibles but were arrested.

Mr Scaramella said that he had questioned former KGB agents, including Mr Litvinenko, on behalf of the Mitrokhin Commission. He insisted that he was not involved in Mr Litvinenko’s murder, even though he was with the Russian at the restaurant.

La Repubblica yesterday published interviews that it conducted last year with Mr Litvinenko and Evgeny Limarev, another former Russian intelligence officer, in which both men claimed that Mr Scaramella used his status within the commission to run a shadowy parallel intelligence operation with right-wing aims.

Mr Guzzanti claimed yesterday that Mr Litvinenko told him that General Andrei Trofimov, his former boss, had warned him not to go to Italy because Romano Prodi, Italy’s Prime Minister, had been a Russian agent. In his posthumously published interview in La Repubblica, however, Mr Litvinenko said that he had never once heard Mr Prodi’s name mentioned.

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