US Edition Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned “not once, but twice” with radioactive polonium-210 by a Russian “death squad” sent by Vladimir Putin, an inquiry into his killing has heard.
The former KGB spy had already survived one attempt on his life by the time he ingested a fatal dose of the rare isotope, but mistakenly thought he was suffering from food poisoning when the first murder attempt made him sick.
Samples of his hair proved that polonium had entered his body on two separate occasions weeks apart, the inquiry into his death in 2006 was told.
For the first time, it also emerged that one of the two prime suspects in the killing had approached a contact in Germany and asked if he knew a chef in London who could slip a “very expensive poison” into Litvinenko’s food or drink.
On the first day of the inquiry, which replaces an inquest into the 43-year-old’s death and has the power to hear secret evidence from intelligence sources, the chairman Sir Robert Owen was given the most detailed account to date of the events surrounding the “state sponsored” assassination.
He was told that Andrey Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard, and former soldier Dmitry Kovtun slipped into the country twice with supplies of polonium-210 and administered the fatal dose in a pot of green tea during a meeting with Litvinenko at London’s Millennium Hotel on November 1, 2006.
But Robin Tam QC, council to the Inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, disclosed that Litvinenko had been the subject of an earlier assassination attempt, during a meeting with Lugovoy and Kovtun at a business premises on October 16 that year.
Lugovoy and Kovtun had flown into the country on that date, and checked into the Best Western Hotel in Shaftesbury Avenue. According to Mr Tam, they had smuggled polonium-210 in their luggage, and left traces of it in their adjacent rooms, 107 and 108. The radioactive material is easily concealed because its alpha radiation is simple to contain and it does not emit gamma radiation of the sort that might be picked up by airport scanners.
Litvinenko had agreed to meet the two men in the boardroom of Erinys, a private security company, where they allegedly slipped him a dose of the poison, which is deadly if ingested in sufficient quantities.
Mr Tam said: “One of the most significant things the evidence suggests is that Mr Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium not once but twice.
“It suggests two things - attempts to poison Mr Litvinenko were made at both meetings and that those attempts met with some success on both occasions.
“Hair samples that are available indicate that Mr Litvinenko may well have been poisoned twice and that the first occasion being much less severe than the second.”
On the evening of October 16, Litvinenko, 43, vomited when he got home and put it down to food poisoning.
The two men left the country on October 18, but on October 30 Kovtun, who had previously lived in Hamburg where he worked in a restaurant, returned to the German city and met a former colleague, referred to only as D3.
Mr Tam said: “Mr Kovtun raised the subject of Mr Litvinenko, who was unknown to D3. Mr Kovtun said that Mr Litvinenko was a traitor with blood on his hands who did deals with Chechnya.”
Kovtun asked D3 whether he knew any cooks working in London, because: “He had a very expensive poison and that he needed the cook to put the poison in Mr Litvinenko's food or drink.”
D3 thought at the time that Kovtun was “talking rubbish” and only later reported the conversation to the authorities. He did know a chef in London, and gave Kovtun his number, which Kovtun later called to ask for a meeting.
Two days later, on November 1, Kovtun flew from Hamburg to London, where he met Lugovoy, who had already arrived and was staying with his family at the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square.
On November 1 Kovtun and Lugovoy met Litvinenko in the hotel’s Pine Bar.
Litvinenko told police there was a silver-coloured teapot and some cups on the table when he arrived at the bar.
He said: “Andrey asked, 'Would you like anything?' I said 'I don't want anything', and he said, 'Okay, well we're going to leave now anyway, so there is still some tea left here, if you want to you can have some'.
“And then the waiter went away, or I think Andrei asked for a clean cup and he brought it. He left and when there was a cup, I poured some tea out of the teapot, although there was only a little left on the bottom and it made just half a cup.
“It was green tea with no sugar and it was already cold by the way. I didn't like it for some reason…maybe in total I swallowed three or four times. I haven't even finished that cup.”
He added: “I don't like when people pay for me but in such an expensive hotel, forgive me, I don't have enough money to pay that.
“Later on, when I left the hotel, I was thinking there is something strange. I had been feeling all the time, I knew that they wanted to kill me, actually. But could I have told this?”
When Litvinenko fell ill, doctors spent weeks trying to diagnose the cause of his illness, but initially discounted radiation poisoning because there were no traces of gamma radiation.
It was only after an “inspired hunch” by an expert that Litvinenko’s urine was tested at the Atomic Weapons Establishment for the much rarer alpha radiation of the kind emitted by polonium.
Tests at the venues visited by Lugovoy and Kovtun showed that in parts of the boardroom where they met Litvinenko on October 16 there was “full scale deflection” of the instruments – in other words the readings were off the scale.
Similar levels of alpha radiation were found in the spout of a teapot at the Millennium Hotel, with lower levels of contamination found in the Pine Bar and Kovtun’s room, 382.