The widow of the murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko has made her strongest call yet for the British government to seize the assets of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
Speaking at a sold-out Guardian Live event in London, Marina Litvinenko told Guardian journalist Luke Harding that she met Theresa May, the home secretary, to demand Ukraine-style sanctions against Putin and those at the highest reaches of Russian government. She told the home secretary that only asset freezes and visa bans can protect the British public from another Kremlin-sponsored killing using lethal radioactive substances. “I don’t want noises. I want action,” she said.
Litvinenko was speaking at a Guardian Members event to mark the launch of Harding’s book A Very Expensive Poison. The book lays out in forensic detail how Litvinenko, a former FSB and KGB spy who worked for MI6, was poisoned with polonium-210 in November 2006 at the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square, London.
“It is very difficult to believe your own government can kill your own people, but now this is what is happening in Russia,” said Litvinenko, whose indefatigable efforts led to the launch of a public enquiry into her husband’s death. She plans to relaunch her 2007 claim lodged in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against the Russian government
“I needed to know who killed him. I needed to know and understand why,” she said. “I didn’t know how long it would take. It took much longer than I expected. I think it is a very big result. Not just for me. In this country when you go for justice, you will get justice. Maybe not quickly, but you will get justice. In a similar situation when people die in Russia they can’t have this justice.”
In January this year, an enquiry led by UK judge Sir Robert Owen found the Russian president had “probably” approved the assassination plan. That ruling sent shockwaves between Moscow, London and beyond. Harding’s book weaves a deft narrative from the tangled material of espionage, betrayal and murder.
Harding explained to Guardian members that he was posted to Moscow by the newspaper in 2007 when the murder of Litvinenko had soured relations between Russia and the UK.
“What was interesting was my story got wrapped up in the Litvinenko story,” he said. “I discovered rather late in the day that the plane my wife and I caught when we went to Moscow on a recce to try and find somewhere to live was the ‘polonium plane’ that had been used by the assassins two days earlier.”
He said he got an email from British Airways urging him to phone NHS Direct if he had any concerns. “That was a more frivolous aspect to it, but essentially within about three or four months I found myself followed around Moscow by strange guy wearing leather jackets and brown shoes. It was made fairly clear that the Litvinenko murder story was taboo. When you are told you can’t investigate something, of course you want to investigate it.”
Harding said Owen’s shocking conclusion that Putin knew about and probably approved the murder of Litvinenko was based in large part on secret material presented to the enquiry by unnamed witnesses in closed sessions held last May.
Those attending the hearings were Owen, the counsel and solicitor to the enquiry, and the home secretary’s legal team – and witnesses whom Harding believes included Litvinenko’s MI6 contacts. This evidence has never been released. “But if anyone in the audience can help, please make yourself known to me,” he said, not entirely in jest.
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