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It may well turn out that Moscow can indeed mount a nuclear attack
in the heart of London.
Scotland Yard is investigating the suspected poisoning
of a Russian dissident living in Britain.
The former KGB colonel is fighting for his life
at University College Hospital.
Alexander Litvinenko died at University College Hospital.
In 2006 ex-Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in London.
Litvinenko had been given a massive dose...
...of this highly toxic radioactive element, polonium 210.
It was like a spy movie.
Three times he accused me to be his killer.
He'd been killed with a kind of micro nuclear bomb.
He said, "Marina I love you so much."
But at the end we couldn't save him.
His widow Marina has lost a husband.
Their 12-year-old son has lost his dad.
The killers left dangerous levels of radiation across the capital.
It's our recommendation that this is a public health issue first,
a police matter second.
We didn't know if anybody else had been affected.
Am I going to get cancer-like symptoms? Am I going to die?
The number of locations were growing by the hour.
It looks pretty clear that this was a Kremlin state hit.
Vladimir Putin suspected of personally ordering
the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko.
This was a targeted murder.
State-sponsored nuclear terrorism on the streets of London.
Vladimir Putin always said
he is responsible for everything that happened.
And I believe it's his responsibility.
Detective...
I need to report a murder.
Who's murder?
Mine.
At a central London hospital,
a man is in intensive care with an unidentified sickness.
He talked very quietly.
He described some symptoms he had
that he was suffering with quite a lot of pain.
But from a medical perspective, we didn't know what was wrong with him.
We genuinely didn't know.
I remember, very specifically, saying to my colleague,
that he looks like somebody who we've just given chemotherapy to.
They lose their hair, they lose their eyebrows.
He couldn't really speak very good English.
He preferred to speak in Russian.
But he had a rather ordinary sounding name.
His name was Edwin, Edwin Carter.
But, there's a twist...
He declares that, actually, he's not Carter,
he's someone else. Not just anyone.
But an ex-KGB agent.
The doctors, I know they do not believe him.
But they do not understand.
I tried to explain,
he actually has a Russian name, Alexander Litvinenko,
and he is a former officer of a security service in Russia,
and he has a lot of powerful enemies and he might be poisoned.
Sasha Litvinenko said to his wife Marina,
"I think I've been poisoned. You know, they've got me."
But, of course, this sounded a little bit crazy.
I know how this happened.
I know when. I know why.
A lot was strange to me.
Sasha was in his bed.
This moment when police got involved,
Sasha realised he might help,
and explain what happened to him,
and all details would be very important.
You have any idea who may have made this order?
Yes, I know the man who ordered this.
His name is Vladimir Putin.
We've now got a very high ranking former KGB, FSB officer
who we now look at as suffering from potentially a murder assassination.
Scotland Yard is investigating the suspected poisoning
of a Russian dissident living in Britain.
Mr Litvinenko is being treated here at University College Hospital.
He's lost all his hair.
He's described as being listless.
He became weaker and weaker.
And nobody knew how long he would be able to give this interview.
He was just starting to tip into critical illness as we call it.
So his systems were starting to shut down one at a time.
That morning, he was actually in reasonably good spirits
and I'd actually helped him sit up
so that he could actually be photographed.
We have a Russian friend in London.
He says we need publicity.
I was against.
I said, "Sasha you don't want to see yourself like that."
But he said, "No, people need to see."
I think it's one of the most astonishing photographs
of the 21st century.
He's basically accusing Vladimir Putin's regime of murdering him.
I see more his strong eyes.
He was not begging for his life.
No, he sends this message,
"I am strong and I will take you.
And you will pay for this."
The former KGB colonel is fighting for his life,
under armed guard at University College Hospital.
We can confirm that there was a dramatic deterioration
in Alexander Litvinenko's condition overnight,
and that he is critically ill in intensive care.
There was constant police presence.
And effectively they were saying "This is going to be a crime scene,"
and they were treating it as such.
I got a phone call from counter-terrorism
and they said, "What poison could have been used on this poor man?"
So I got my team together, and we went through various things,
and we came up, I think, with five, one of which was thallium.
And the other one we came up with was internal radiation.
A radioactive substance that has been ingested,
and actually producing its radiation inside the body.
And they said, "Well, how do you test for that?"
This is James Cairns calling from Aldermaston.
I have a result for you on the urine sample.
They delivered a large volume of urine
which could then be analysed by alpha spectrometry,
so we could then find out
what activity had been potentially taken in by Mr Litvinenko.
The sample contains clear traces of the substance polonium 210.
Polonium is commonly accepted to be
the most dangerous substance known to man.
I was astounded.
I knew about polonium 210 from my time in nuclear submarines.
I knew a little about it.
I knew that it was an alpha emitter,
and had been used in earlier nuclear weapons
as the trigger to make nuclear explosions.
Polonium 210 is the substance that gives off alpha radiation.
It doesn't travel very far, it doesn't go through walls.
But if it gets into the body, it's very dangerous.
Polonium 210 is very toxic.
One microgram can kill people.
We were able to say, "Yes, look, he's had a concentration
that would be lethal to anyone who had that intake of radioactivity.
I will die, yes...
but I will die a free person.
At about ten to nine that evening all the buzzers went off in the unit
for a cardiac arrest, and we rushed into his room
and, for half an hour, tried to restart his heart.
At 9:21, it became apparent that there was nothing more we could do.
So we terminated CPR and he was declared deceased.
We're sorry to announce that Alexander Litvinenko died
at University College Hospital, at 9:21,
on the 23rd of November 2006.
It really does take me back to a very strange time.
The medical team did everything possible to save his life.
After he died, it was my job
to go and speak to his wife Marina and their son.
I remember that she was very calm, very dignified, accepted it.
I think she looked down and nodded her head as I remember.
It's something I have a sort of visual memory of
because it was a very unusual moment.
I remember it was a very young doctor
and I tried to think about him.
I thought, "Oh my god,
how it would be difficult for this young man
to say what happened to his patient.
He died.
And he let me go to see Sasha.
Anatoly spent maybe 30 seconds, but it was huge stress.
He couldn't believe it was his daddy.
He looked different.
It was awful.
And I stayed as long as I could.
I could kiss him, I could touch him.
And to say I became as a stone...
maybe not, but I just tried to limit any emotions.
Just trying to save you with like a power saving.
The discovery of polonium puts this case at the top
of the Metropolitan Police agenda.
I've called an emergency meeting with the relevant agencies.
We were unprecedented and dark waters.
It looked pretty clear that this was a Kremlin state hit.
It may well turn out that Moscow can indeed mount a nuclear attack
in the heart of London and get away with murder.
Tonight police were removing material from the sushi bar.
Crime scenes literally started
within an hour of Mr Litvinenko passing away.
And then it went through the night.
I remember it as being very intense.
Polonium is involved, radioactivity is involved,
therefore you assume the worst case until you know better.
Nuclear scientists quickly discover dangerous radioactive contamination
in the heart of central London.
This is one of the world's busiest cities.
Flood the streets with uniform, it can create a panic.
Radiation is such a scary word.
And you know I did a lot of work in public health
and I knew that's a word that frightens people.
Could others have been contaminated
by the radioactive material that killed the ex-spy?
We knew very little.
We had generic plans,
but what we had not done, is to anticipate
a substantial release of polonium 210 in the centre of London.
Death of a spy. He was killed by radiation.
The extraordinary twist in Britain's most bizarre murder mystery.
There was huge fear, and people realised he'd been killed
with a deadly, radioactive isotope.
A kind of micro nuclear bomb.
Doctors said Litvinenko had been given a massive dose
of the radioactive element polonium 210.
It is a highly toxic radioactive element, polonium 210.
A lot of things I watched on TV,
and I even couldn't believe it's about us,
it's about our family and for what happened to us.
There was an astonishing death bed statement by Alexander Litvinenko.
It's an accusatory, behind the grave attack on Vladimir Putin.
"You may succeed in silencing one man,
but the howl of protest from around the world,
will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."
The problem was it was actually not just about one man,
an enemy of Putin, being killed and poisoned in dramatic circumstances.
It was also a major public health crisis.
It was quite a difficult time for us because we had really no idea
what risk we'd been at.
People had been very intimately in contact with him.
You know, the cardiac arrest, it's a messy business.
There's a lot of bodily fluids.
When health protection came in, they were wearing full hazmat suits.
Many of us saw that and thought, "Am I going to get cancer-like symptoms?
Am I going to die?"
The places he visited are now being searched,
and radioactivity has already been detected at three of them...
Police have now confirmed that traces of polonium 210
have been found at several locations,
including Mr Litvinenko's home in Muswell Hill.
The hunt for forensic evidence went on all day today
at Mr Litvinenko's North London home.
I received a call from police and they said you'd better leave.
They gave me 30 minutes to take what I need for two days
and take Anatoly, and we left.
There was very great concern about the danger of the polonium
and whether people could be affected by it.
They obviously secured his property,
and the sense was that you could get it off the doorknob of the house.
There were basically two investigations going on together.
One the police investigation, and two the protection of public health.
We're here because what we've had is an unprecedented event in the UK,
that someone has apparently deliberately been poisoned
with a type of radiation.
In 2006, Pat Troop's job was to protect the public,
from biological, chemical and radiological attack.
At the beginning, we just didn't know.
We didn't know if anyone else was affected.
We didn't know the implications of the level of contamination.
The word radiation is so scary.
We knew that it would cause a lot of anxiety amongst the public.
It is serious enough to have prompted
the government's emergency planning group COBRA to discuss the affair.
There are people in this room who are keen to start a murder enquiry.
It's our recommendation
that this is a public health issue first, a police matter second.
It was pretty tense.
There were so many unknowns.
I did feel for Pat Troop.
Her radar was flying...
a thousand miles an hour because she saw the danger to the public.
Our radar was flying, because
we felt there was a serious crime here to be investigated.
It's not a public health issue first, is it?
That's the recommendation.
The police had a major enquiry.
Under normal circumstances, they'd have what you call gold command,
and everybody else would work to them.
But in this one, we were working in parallel.
But obviously, some were used to being in gold command
who weren't sure about that.
When Litvinenko died,
the Kremlin immediately said, "Nothing to do with us."
There's no evidence. This is all just hysteria from the West.
But ultimately, Vladimir Putin is very happy to break the rules.
He sees international law as meaningless.
And more than that, he has a peculiar,
and vengeful fascination with traitors.
He feels personally betrayed by them.
Stepping up the enquiry,
counter-terrorism police dig deep into Litvinenko's past.
Litvinenko was a Russian with a backstory.
He actually worked for the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB.
And he was someone who had fled from Vladimir Putin.
And he fell out majorly with his bosses at the FSB,
whom he accused of taking bribes, drug money, corruption.
In 2000, Litvinenko fled Russia for asylum in Britain.
What Litvinenko did was to swap Moscow
for a rather suburban existence in North London with his wife, Marina
and their then quite small son Anatoly,
or Antony as he became known.
When we arrived in London, for me, a former dancer,
it was my dream to go to England for ballroom dancing
and I couldn't believe one day I would be there.
And Sasha tried to make this just like a dream come to real.
We took bus tour, we went to London Eye, we went to museums.
But in one month I realised it is not a tour.
We need to start another, new life.
He just was an ordinary guy.
He used to bring his little boy to the football.
And he used to turn up in his full football kit,
looking like an ordinary dad come to see his kid playing football.
But Alexander Litvinenko was no ordinary dad.
My name is Alexander Litvinenko. I am former KGB FSB officer.
My speech is difficult for me. Can I use translator?
This is Litvinenko, speaking in London,
just two weeks before he fell ill.
He'd come to mourn a close friend, Anna Politkovskaya.
Anna Politkovskaya was a famous, crusading journalist,
and a critic of Vladimir Putin.
She wrote about human rights abuses,
the Russian security services,
and she was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment
in October, 2006.
Somebody has asked you directly,
who is guilty of Anna's death? Who has killed?
And I can directly answer you.
It is Mr Putin, the president of the Russian Federation
who has killed her.
And essentially before the world, he says, "I can name the killer,
he is Mr Putin, the president of the Russian Federation.
Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer.
He sees the world in paranoid and conspiratorial ways.
And first and foremost,
he believes that anyone who was a traitor should be punished.
And the punishment is well understood. It is death.
Barely two weeks after accusing Putin of murder,
Litvinenko ingested a lethal dose of polonium 210,
a poison now discovered in several London locations.
Were there other locations?
What were the implications of the severity of this?
A level of contamination, we'd never seen that level of contamination.
There'd been a lot of consideration about radiation scenarios.
Particularly in the context of terrorist activity.
Dirty bombs, ect.
Anybody that thought they had been present in the contaminated sites
were able to ring in.
They were then offered a test for polonium 210.
So we needed to find what we now call contact tracing,
test, trace, isolate, in Covid terms.
We needed to find the people who had been in those situations and places,
and work out whether we could determine if they had been exposed.
NHS Direct are fielding hundreds of calls from the public.
Many have visited a restaurant in Mayfair
which is contaminated with polonium.
In the middle of central London, Itsu sushi bar,
closed to the public today,
where Alexander Litvinenko ate before falling ill.
A closure sign blames an international espionage incident.
On the first of November, the day he falls ill,
Litvinenko meets intelligence contact Mario Scaramella, at Itsu.
Downstairs polonium has been detected around one of the tables.
Itsu got a lot of attention because that's where Litvinenko had been
and met Mario Scaramella.
And the concern was, was that where he'd been poisoned?
What's happened was and still is unbelievable.
I discovered that, three times, he accused me to be his killer.
Scaramella was a person of interest.
It had been flagged up by Litvinenko himself.
So no way we could ignore that.
Litvinenko and Scaramella had met before.
They were friends or kind of co-strugglers, you might say,
in the battle against the Russian regime.
Scaramella liked the sort of trade craft.
He liked the spy games.
We met at 3 o'clock in Piccadilly Circus, as always.
Then we moved to the sushi bar,
and he had his lunch.
Scaramella rather theatrically handed over a hit list of people
that Moscow was planning to target
and Litvinenko's name was on the list.
It was urgent for me to discuss with Litvinenko this blacklist,
considering the first name on it was Anna Politkovskaya
and the second was Alexander.
I flew back to London on November 24, voluntarily.
I offered my cooperation to the British Police.
Mr Scaramella, I am Detective Chief Inspector Duncan Ball.
We know he had a meeting in the Itsu restaurant.
Identified it as a primary site with high readings for polonium
and so, suddenly, our alarm bells start to ring.
For the first time, I felt not in control.
Seems that Litvinenko was mentioning me as his own suspect.
And so it was important to clarify everything with Scotland Yard.
So I insisted on having this talk.
Scaramella isn't the only person Litvinenko meets
on the first of November.
After eating at Itsu,
Litvinenko meets two men at the Millennium Hotel
in Grosvenor Square.
On the day he fell ill, Alexander Litvinenko met with two men here.
One is an old Russian acquaintance of Litvinenko's, Andrey Lugovoy.
The second is Dmitry Kovtun, Lugovoy's associate.
Lugovoy and Kovtun were childhood friends,
but they were also very different.
Lugovoy was more successful, perhaps a bit brighter.
Whereas Kovtun was a failure.
He deserted from the Soviet military, was a waiter.
Even fantasised about being a soft porn star.
But really nothing ever came of any of his dreams.
They were here on business around oil,
and investments around that with British companies.
So I think Litvinenko saw potentially a business opportunity
as well as probably renewing and rekindling friendships.
In the hotel bar where the men meet, there's more polonium contamination.
It's also found in North London,
where Lugovoy watches a football match,
soon after meeting Litvinenko in Mayfair.
It does start to paint a picture,
because we were able to start to pick together
what we considered to be the trail.
They called it the polonium trail.
The Polonium trail reveals that the first of November
isn't the first time Lugovoy and Kovtun
have met Litvinenko in London.
So you're using everything.
Credit card receipts, CCTV,
mobile phone siteage, anything you can pull on.
The paper trail leads to a Soho hotel,
two weeks before Litvinenko fell ill.
Scientists are sent in to investigate.
If you're trying to find polonium,
you need specialist equipment to find it.
But... that was my job.
This detector is very similar to the type of equipment
that we brought up to London with us to find where the polonium 210 was.
And this instrument shows me, in counts per second,
if there was polonium there and how much there was.
When we came into the hotel to look for polonium 210,
we found radiation was up at one and a half thousand counts per second.
And so because of that, I sent teams into London, into this hotel,
to check every single hotel room, every corridor, every toilet,
the kitchen areas, reception...
If you imagine that kind of level of detail and monitoring,
you start to get a feel for just what an enormous task this was.
So if we look at the front door,
you can clearly see that the door handle was contaminated.
Then, once we're inside the room,
you can see very clearly where he touched in the room.
There's polonium on the telephone.
He must have made a phone call.
There is polonium on the curtains.
He must have opened and closed the curtains
when he went to bed and got up in the morning.
But then if we go through into the bathroom,
if you look down the plug hole, the U-bend of the sink,
you'll see a reading which is now 1,500 counts per second.
That can't have just come off his hands.
So the theory here is that polonium 210 was poured down that sink.
Polonium has escaped into London's water system.
We understand there were urgent talks between Thames Water
and the Health Protection Agency about where it would all end up.
Radiation found across London
increasingly points to the two Russians
who met Litvinenko on the day he fell ill.
I think the case the police were putting together
was really convincing.
Because the polonium 210 traces
and the movements of Lugovoy and Kovtun were totally connected.
Lugovoy and Kovtun had left this billowing,
ghostly trail of polonium all over London.
A month after Litvinenko was poisoned,
dangerous levels of radiation are found in more locations.
In the last hour Scotland Yard has confirmed traces of polonium 210
have been found at the offices in Mayfair.
They say they're continuing to work with the Health Protection Agency
to discover how it got there.
25 Grosvenor Street was a key meeting place.
Police learn Kovtun and Lugovoy met Litvinenko here
on their first visit to London,
two weeks before the ex-spy was poisoned.
Lugovoy was saying repeatedly to Litvinenko,
"Wouldn't you like some tea? English drink tea all the time."
But, of course, Litvinenko didn't touch the cup.
Contamination is found inside the building.
If you look at the photographs, it's a boardroom, primary site.
High readings there.
So you start to build a picture here of wherever this guy goes, Lugovoy,
there's traces of polonium.
This is now a major public health emergency.
The clean-up operation after the poisoning was enormous.
Huge areas of central London were contaminated and had to be shut off.
So our monitoring task was huge.
We had a nightclub, we had more restaurants, another hotel.
This is such dangerous stuff.
And the fact that we found high doses in places like the Sheraton,
you think, well what happened there?
At the Park Lane Sheraton in Mayfair,
police now discover Andrey Lugovoy was in London, not once,
but twice, in October.
The detective said "We found lethal polonium in a hotel room,"
and I thought, "My word."
Anything involving radioactive material is a true weapon of terror,
just because of the fear it strikes
into the hearts and minds of the general public.
There were over 30,000 counts per second found in a bin.
A toilet lid, 40,000 counts.
Over 10,000 counts per second on a towel found in the laundry chute.
The police officers, I had to advise them,
if you're going in to gather evidence,
then you need to wear self-contained breathing apparatus.
In other words, mask with an air tank, etc.,
o go in and collect the evidence.
Lugovoy's second visit to London is a bit of a curious affair.
He flies in on the 25th.
And he meets with Alexander Litvinenko again
in this sort of Chinese-themed downstairs bar.
In my mind, he was actually working with
the container of the polonium 210 at that point.
So I was aware, perhaps there had been one attempt that had failed.
Maybe two attempts that had failed.
The trail was absolutely everywhere.
And Scotland Yard managed to impound the British Airways plane
that they had flown from Moscow to London with.
Tonight, British Airways is at the centre of this dramatic spy story
with detectives apparently investigating
whether a killer carrying radioactive material
might have travelled on board.
They knew what seats they'd been in. So they could work on those seats.
And they found massive radiation.
Confirm contamination on seat 23D.
23D was...
Lugovoy.
Increasingly, this trail of contamination
looks like the radioactive fingerprints
of Litvinenko's poisoners.
The polonium trail leads back to Mayfair,
where police now discover Mario Scaramella wasn't the only person
who'd met Litvinenko at Itsu.
We know that the victim, Litvinenko, met with Kovtun and Lugovoy
in the Itsu restaurant.
The police gave me the plan of the sushi bar,
asking me where we sat.
Radiation was found at a table next to the wall,
but Scaramella had sat with Litvinenko
in the centre of the room, where no polonium was found.
It wasn't until Scaramella was able to describe
where he was sitting with Litvinenko,
and we were able to compare that with where we found the traces.
Then it became less likely Scaramella was responsible.
Police are even more convinced,
the Itsu contamination came from either Andrey Lugovoy,
or Dmitri Kovtun.
Suddenly, Lugovoy called me,
and he said, "I don't know what happened,
but it's not true, and I definitely will go,
and try to find what is real, what happened."
For me it was just a little strange.
Again just try to think why?
What is he trying to achieve, calling me?
What is this part of the game, to take this attention from him?
The police investigation will proceed,
and I think people should know that there is no diplomatic
or political barrier in the way of that investigation
going wherever it needs to go.
As the investigation starts to take shape,
all the evidence is starting to point to these two perpetrators,
Kovtun and Lugovoy.
The next step is to get on a plane to Russia.
British detectives were allowed to ask questions of Mr Kovtun today,
at the same hospital where Mr Lugovoy is being treated,
apparently for radiation poisoning.
Obviously the detectives were hoping to get some evidence,
talk to the two chief suspects, Lugovoy and Kovtun.
Build a case.
When they eventually got in to interview Kovtun,
they were told by the Russians
you've now got ten minutes to ask those questions.
Gentlemen, this is Dmitry Kovtun.
I mean it was a bizarre scenario for the detectives to be confronted with
a man who was supposedly Kovtun.
This is Dmitry Kovtun?
Completely bandaged up around his face.
Who knows, still, who that was?
You might have thought
that the Russians were giving the police a run around.
When they then went to interview Lugovoy,
we weren't allowed to tape it, they were going to tape the interview.
And the final insult was that when they got back to the UK,
the key tape, with the key suspect Lugovoy,
had gone missing and there was just blank noise.
The mystery surrounding Alexander Litvinenko's death
is more and more complex.
But the grief of a family is easy to understand.
And this was a lot of people.
It was a helicopter.
It was like something out of a film set.
Because there were lots of people who looked well-connected
in some of the security agencies.
And that was at a time which I think was very difficult for the family.
It was a special coffin.
A lot of protection.
And discussion for how deep it should be.
His widow Marina has lost a husband.
Their 12-year-old son has lost his dad.
As they walk to the grave, she took his hand.
I remember his first question to me being,
"Mama are you going to be depressed?"
I say I'm not because I wanted him to believe we will survive.
There was a hum in my office, shut the door,
head down, what are our priorities? What are we going to do?
What we don't have is a weapon.
That's what's missing.
A key part of the investigation is to retrace the steps,
not only of the victim,
but also the two who we believe to be the perpetrators.
After discovering two earlier meetings in October,
between Lugovoy and Litvinenko.
the police now focus on Lugovoy's third London trip in early November.
This time, he and Kovtun are staying
at Mayfair's five-star Millennium Hotel.
Tonight, the Millennium Hotel's Pine Bar remains closed.
Police officers say they'll again be working into the early hours.
They believe they're at the scene of the crime.
But all the other key questions are still waiting for answers.
Dots were being joined up, an image was starting to form.
There is some very interesting CCTV footage from the Millennium Hotel.
We see Kovtun, Lugovoy arrive, waiting.
We see Litvinenko coming in on his phone,
obviously trying to find out where they are.
Police now reconstruct Lugovoy and Kovtun's movements
in the minutes before they met Litvinenko.
You see Lugovoy,
from above, going towards the gents toilets on the ground floor.
And he's got this kind of really grim expression on his face.
We don't know if it is significant but one of his hands
is tucked into a pocket.
And not only that, but Kovtun goes the same way,
also caught on CCTV going in.
Then when you go into the gents and you then examine it,
there are high traces of polonium.
So we found very high levels of contamination
on one of the hand dryers.
And, instantly, the gents toilets in the Millennium
were closed to the public.
But when you put that alongside all the other trail of polonium,
which marries up where these two individuals had gone to,
as perpetrators, it starts to become compelling.
In the Pine Bar, where the three men meet,
police find huge levels of radiation.
And there's a bar receipt.
It shows Lugovoy bought drinks, including tea, for the meeting.
I had understood Litvinenko was extremely careful,
and would only normally drink Coca Cola,
with the top taken off in front of him.
But he did drink green tea with Kovtun and Lugovoy in the Pine Bar.
So all the crockery was taken away and tested.
Traced all the crockery, all the utensils, and there was loads of it.
And it came up trumps, because lo and behold...
one teapot was alive with polonium.
They had full scale deflection.
The needle couldn't move any further on the rate metre.
The forensic scientists take a reading and they have to retreat
because it is just too dangerous for them to be there.
The killers probably deployed it
as a sort of capsule wrapped in gelatin,
dropped it into the teapot,
the gelatin melts, and the polonium is released.
He made a mistake, and he knew this.
He knew he might be poisoned.
Meeting Lugovoy, he was not forcing,
but making it so, psychologically, you just can't say no.
And when he took two sips, he realised he did something wrong.
If it was proved that Russian agents have poisoned Alexander Litvinenko
in this hotel,
then that would amount to an act of state-sponsored nuclear terrorism
on the streets of London.
We were convinced that there was a threshold met for prosecution.
And I think all the evidence is pretty compelling.
Andrey Lugovoy, former Russian secret agent
with close ties to the Kremlin,
and the man today charged with murdering Alexander Litvinenko.
I was pretty angry with the people that had done this.
Not only had they committed a terrible murder,
but they had potentially put a lot of other people at risk.
In 2007, a warrant is issued for Andrey Lugovoy's arrest
and extradition from Russia.
It was the most audacious act
I would ever have witnessed in my time as a police officer.
But Moscow denies everything, and resists the extradition request.
Lugovoy and Kovtun went back to Russia and nothing happened.
Lugovoy stands up and denies it all.
Did you kill Alexander Litvinenko?
I didn't kill.
And yet there's an arrest warrant out for him.
The dissident Russian spies' widow has fought for 8 years for this,
her day in court.
Today the public enquiry began into her husband's murder.
Marina Litvinenko is one of the warmest, kindest,
most compassionate people I have ever met.
Mr Lugovoy and Kovtun deliberately administrated polonium 210
to Mr Litvinenko, intending it to kill him.
What happened to her husband, the politics of it for sure,
but also on a personal level, drives her campaign for justice.
The 2015 inquiry finds damning evidence against Andrey Lugovoy.
The whole world, even Russia, know he is a criminal.
He is a murderer.
But could this man have given the order
to exterminate Alexander Litvinenko?
The charge is an onerous one.
Vladimir Putin suspected of personally ordering
the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko.
Your president, probably involved in the killing of a former agent.
Of course, it is pure propaganda.
If anybody can furnish any conversations, logs, papers, etc.,
proving that I was acting on Putin's orders, Kremlin or whoever,
then I will say bravo and applaud.
We have to recognise that Russia says this is not true.
There was no Kremlin plot.
But it was astonishing.
The evidence ran to hundreds and hundreds of pages.
All of which lead a judge to conclude
that Vladimir Putin had probably, personally,
ordered Litvinenko's death.
He was poisoned here in Britain.
A hit that was probably ordered by Putin.
We have a finding, we know what happened,
but we still don't have justice.
The suspects are still in Moscow, beyond the reach of British law.
And the man who sent them, Vladimir Putin, is still Russia's president.
Have you a seen any crime suspect that says "Yes, I did it"?
No, of course. What's he going to say?
This is politics. Deny anything.
If you saying you invade Ukraine,
you say, "No, we won't invade Ukraine."
If you say you killed this... You say, "No, we didn't."
Vladimir Putin always said,
he is responsible for everything that happened.
And I believe it is his responsibility.
Subtitles: Lily Ray plint.com