MOSCOW, January 29 /TASS/. Most Russians do not believe the conclusions of the British final report on a public inquiry into the death of Russia’s former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, an opinion poll carried out by the Levada Center suggests. Its results were published by the Kommersant newspaper on Thursday.

"Only 3% of the respondents believe there were ‘real grounds’ to believe that the Russian leadership was linked to Alexander Litvinenko’s death. Another 9% assume there must have been such grounds. Fifty-three percent do not believe the inquiry’s results while 36% refused to give any answer," Kommersant said.

"This theme is of little interest to the population in general. Only 2.5% of respondents called the verdict on Litvinenko’s case the most remembered event of the past month although it was one of the last before the poll, which took place on January 22-25, Alexey Grazhdankin, the Levada Center deputy director said.

The final report on the public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko was published in London on January 21. The document said that Russia was linked to Litvinenko’s murder while the two Russians, Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, had acted as perpetrators. But, the British investigators failed to confirm the Russian origin of the Polonium, which, according to them, had been used to poison the former FSB employee.

Moscow described the British conclusions as politicized. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that very serious accusations had been launched against Russia’s senior leadership without the provision of any convincing piece of evidence. He added that the British leaders could easily be prosecuted for slander if a good lawyer had analyzed all the facts and statements carefully.

Alexander Litvinenko who had an asylum in Britain died in London on November 23, 2006 after being poisoned by radioactive polonium. The circumstances of his death are still unknown and continue to be a source of controversy. The lawyers of Litvinenko’s widow admitted that at the time of death Litvinenko had already worked for money for the British foreign intelligence service (Mi-6) and Spain. Litvinenko had become a British subject shortly before his death.