Ex-KGB agent links Brits to spy's death

MOSCOW — After months of saying very little, the former KGB agent accused of poisoning Alexander Litvinenko said in a lengthy statement Thursday that Britain's secret services may have had a hand in the slaying.

Andrei Lugovoi's sensational claim, which was certain to further damage relations between Moscow and London, was part of an elaborate tale that included a secret codebook and a supposed British plot to smear Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But he offered no evidence to back his claims, and for some his explanation created more confusion than clarity.

Litvinenko, a renegade member of the Russian secret services hated by many former colleagues, died in a London hospital last November after ingesting radioactive polonium-210. He accused Putin on his deathbed of being behind his killing — charges the Kremlin has angrily denied.

Lugovoi, who met with Litvinenko on Nov. 1 in London, hours before the former agent fell ill, described the British accusations against him as an effort to shift suspicion away from the British spy services, who he said might be implicated in the crime.

He said Litvinenko tried to recruit him to work for MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, and to gather compromising materials about Putin and his family.

"It's hard to get rid of the thought that Litvinenko was an agent who got out of the secret service's control and was eliminated," Lugovoi said. "Even if it was not done by the secret service itself, it was done under its control or connivance."

The British Foreign Office declined comment.

Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general who lives in the United States, told The Associated Press that Lugovoi's story was "ridiculous," intended to mask the complicity of Russian security services in Litvinenko's death.

"Lugovoi was part of this Russian security services team, and they are trying to find stories to cover up the crime that they committed," he said. "This was just another falsehood, another lie."

Kalugin, whom Russia convicted in absentia of spying for the West in 2002, added that "one day we will learn that Lugovoi is a hero of Russia, decorated for what he did in London, where he was just carrying out his duty as a Russian officer."