Kremlin has no faith in UK Litvinenko probe — spokesman

MOSCOW, July 31. /TASS/. The Kremlin has no faith in the UK inquiry into the death of former Federal Security Service agent Alexander Litvinenko, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.

A UK police spokesman said in the High Court of Justice in London on Thursday the investigators had no doubts that Russian nationals Andrey Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun were complicit in the poisoning of Litvinenko. The police spokesman also said the High Court of Justice in London should establish whether the Russian state was complicit in Litvinenko’s death.

"No, we don’t have trust for this. "If you remember, when Litvinenko died, similar full-size accusations were made both by UK officials and agencies that were just beginning to investigate this case," the Kremlin spokesman said.

"We have already heard this and such statements were made without any results of the investigation and after the results of some investigation. To all appearances, something has to be added to consider these words as convincing," the Kremlin spokesman said.

The Kremlin spokesman declined to make any assumptions on the consequences of the UK’s probe into Litvinenko’s death.

"I don’t know, this is not our agenda of the day, this is a UK internal investigation. This is because we don’t have and would not like to have any relation to it," the Kremlin spokesman said.

In Peskov’s opinion, this case can be regarded as a high-profile probe only for the UK.

Litvinenko who had been an officer of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, defected to England where he received political asylum. He died in London on November 23, 2006. As an expert study found, he was poisoned with radioactive polonium but the circumstances of his death have not been established to date.

The lawyers of the poisoned agent’s widow admitted that before his death Litvinenko had worked for the special services of the United Kingdom (MI-6) and Spain for several years.