Alexander Litvinenko suspected that he had been poisoned as soon as he fell ill on November 1, Marina, his widow, said yesterday.

Mrs Litvinenko, the 44-year-old widow of the former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) lieutenant-colonel who died three weeks later, spoke through her tears of the last moments she spent with him.

“He could just say a few words, only single words, but when I asked him if he was OK before I went, he said, ‘Marina, I love you so much’,” she said, in an interview on Sky News.

Mrs Litvinenko backed his claim that he was the victim of a Moscow hit squad. “I know what happened [to my husband]. I know what happened to other people in Russia who stay in prison and camps without any reason,” she said.

As soon as he started to feel ill Litvinenko told his wife that he might have been poisoned. “He was so fit and didn’t drink or smoke. But he knew this wasn’t normal. I have never seen anyone vomit like that. He said he felt like people had poisoned him with a chemical weapon. He’d studied such things at the military academy and he knew the symptoms,” she told The Sunday Times.

She said she and her husband had felt that Britain was a safe place to live. He became a British citizen in October.

“Life here in England fooled us. After six years we were different people from who we were in Russia,” she said.

However, she acknowledged that her husband’s public criticisms of the FSB had made him enemies.

“I’m absolutely sure they didn’t forgive him for what he did,” she said.

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