The Guardian

Moscow killed Litvinenko, European court rules

Haroon Siddique Andrew Roth

The European court of human rights has ruled Russia was responsible for the 2006 murder by radiation poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London.

In a judgment published yesterday, the ECHR found beyond reasonable doubt that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun killed former KGB officer Litvinenko and did so while “acting as agents of the respondent state [Russia]”.

Its findings were consistent with those of a 2016 UK public inquiry, which found that Litvinenko was murdered by the Russian agents and that he was probably murdered on the personal orders of Vladimir Putin.

The court said Russia, like the UK a member of the Council of Europe, which oversees the ECHR, had not made any serious attempt to counter the findings of the UK authorities.

It ordered Russia to pay the

applicant, Litvinenko’s wife, Marina, €100,000 (£86,000) in damages plus €22,500 in costs but rejected her claim for “punitive” damages, the award of which would have been unprecedented in the ECHR.

She said the case had never been about money but about getting justice and holding Putin responsible.

“It has taken 15 years to establish conclusively that Vladimir Putin murdered my husband, and to hold Russia accountable for its actions in an international court,” she said. “I would like to hope that Sasha’s death, and the quest for justice that has dominated my life since then, have not been in vain. This ruling should make a turning point in the appeasement of Putin.”

Alexander Litvinenko, who was 43 when he died, spoke out about corruption inside Russia before fleeing with his family to Britain. He was poisoned with the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

Lugovoi and Kovtun, whom Litvinenko met in London have repeatedly denied involvement. In its submission to the court, Russia argued that its domestic investigation had not established the involvement of any state authorities or special agents and that a search of Lugovoi’s office, car and home did not yield any incriminating evidence.

The ECHR said: “The use of polonium 210 strongly indicates that Mr Lugovoi and Mr Kovtun were acting with the support of a state entity which enabled them to procure the poison. A radioactive isotope was an unlikely murder weapon for common criminals and must have come from a reactor under state control.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov condemned the ECHR ruling as “groundless” and said that Moscow would not pay the penalty imposed by the court.

He said the Strasbourg court “does not have the authority or the technical capabilities” to rule on the case and claimed that the court’s investigation “had not yielded any results, so making these kinds of assertions is groundless at the least”.

Lugovoi, currently an MP in Russia’s lower house of parliament, told the Interfax news service that the ruling was “unjust, illegal, and politically motivated”.

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2021-09-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://guardian.pressreader.com/article/281852941711057

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