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Two Old Friends at Center of Poison Mystery
German police officers search for traces of polonium-210 near a house in Haselau, Germany, visited by Russian businessman Dmitry Kovtun, now under treatment in Moscow.
(By Andreas Rentz -- Getty Images)
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In many places he went, he left traces of radiation: on one of the documents he submitted at the visa office; on a couch where he slept in his ex-wife's apartment; and in the BMW that brought him from the airport.
Wall remained hospitalized Tuesday, with her two young children from a separate relationship, as doctors tried to determine whether they had been exposed to polonium.
Hamburg law enforcement authorities sent an official request to the Russian government Tuesday for cooperation, but said officials in Moscow have not been forthcoming. German inspectors have not been given access to the Aeroflot plane in which Kovtun traveled from Moscow to Hamburg.
"The tunnel is still rather dark," Hamburg police spokesman Ralf Meyer said. "We cannot yet say with certainty whether he had polonium inside his body, whether he carried it with him on his body, or what he did here."
Across the street from Kovtun's apartment stands a district office of the German Greens party. "Nuclear Power? No Thanks," shouts a poster in the window.
It came as a shock for the neighbors to learn that the Russian emigre had potentially exposed them. "That something like this could be found in a residential neighborhood is just stunning," said Phyliss Demirel, a Greens official and city council member in Hamburg's Altona district. "People have children here. They live and work here. Every place this guy went, there are more and more consequences."
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lugovoy, 41, continued to serve with a federal protection unit. A year later, he was director of security at ORT, the television channel controlled by Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire who fled Russia in 2000 after clashing with Putin.
In June 2001, Lugovoy was charged with attempting to arrange the escape from custody of Nikolai Glushkov, first vice general director of Aeroflot, the Russian airline in which Berezovsky was a major shareholder. Glushkov and several other Aeroflot executives were charged with misappropriation of funds. Berezovsky has said that Glushkov was cleaning up black accounts in the airline that were used by the domestic security agency, the FSB.
Lugovoy was found guilty.
After getting out of prison, he went into business. In an interview with Echo Moskvy, he said he is an owner of a factory producing honey wine south of Moscow. Lugovoy also has an interest in a security firm in Moscow, according to news reports here.
Lugovoy said he had known Litvinenko for 10 years but had no personal or business relationship with him before Litvinenko fled Moscow after alleging that intelligence services had a role in the bombing of Russian apartment buildings.
Although Kovtun maintained his German residency papers, he moved back to Moscow. Lugovoy and Kovtun "began to work together," Vyacheslav Sokolenko, another former KGB man who now runs a security agency, said in an interview. He also served in the Ninth Department after graduating from the same military college as the two others.
