LONDON, January 21. /TASS/. The conclusions of the UK public inquiry report into the murder case of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko will damage the Russian-British bilateral relations, Russian Ambassador to London Alexander Yakovenko said on Thursday after being summoned to the British Foreign Office where he was informed about the final report into the circumstances of Litvinenko’s death published in London.
"This gross provocation of the British authorities cannot but damage our bilateral ties," the diplomat said after visiting the Foreign Office.
"We consider the Litvinenko case and how it was ‘closed’ as a flagrant provocation by the British authorities," Yakovenko said.
According to the diplomat, it is inadmissible to suspect that Russia is allegedly linked to the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
"It is absolutely inadmissible for us that the Russian state is suspected of links to Litvinenko’s death," the Russian diplomat said.
Britain’s actions on Litvinenko case create dangerous precedent
The use by the British side of legal arrangements in political games creates a dangerous precedent, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mariya Zakharova said Thursday after Britain made public a report of a public investigation into the circumstances of Russian Federal Security Service defector Alexander Litvinenko’s death.
"The actions of the British side," Zakharova said, "create a dangerous precedent of using internal legal mechanisms for a politically biased and non-transparent investigation with results determined beforehand, fully replacing by that objective court proceedings and making just an ordered politicized farce out of a normal court process."
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman recalled that "the Russian side has repeatedly voiced its interest in an objective and unbiased investigation of the causes of death of not only Litvinenko but in general Russian nationals [and there are many of them], who, under various circumstances, including very strange ones, have regularly died and keep dying in Great Britain."
"The fact that as an interested side, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation actively took part in an open coroner’s investigation, which was earlier conducted in line with British laws on the territory of Great Britain, testifies to that," Zakharova said.
"As is known, this notorious ‘public investigation’ was started after the suspension of the coroner’s investigation, which, by all appearances, did not give the British authorities the outcome they were seeking," she said.
"At that, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation was forced to give up participation in that 'public investigation' solely due to its non-transparency and inevitable politicization of the court process," Zakharova said.
"As a result, our assumptions were fully justified," she said. "The process was non-transparent, secret, classified to the maximum and of course maximally politicized."