A former Russian security service officer said in a letter from prison released Friday that he had warned former spy Alexander Litvinenko years ago that the KGB’s main successor agency had formed a death squadron to kill him and other Kremlin foes, The Associated Press reports.
Mikhail Trepashkin said that an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, known by its Russian acronym FSB, met with him in August 2002 and offered him the chance to join a group targeting Boris Berezovsky, a self-exiled Russian tycoon living in London, and Litvinenko. He said he refused to cooperate with the team, whose task was to “mop up” Berezovsky, Litvinenko and their accomplices.
“Back in 2002, I warned Alexander Litvinenko that they set up a special team to kill him,” Trepashkin wrote in a letter dated Nov. 23, which was released Friday by rights activists in Yekaterinburg, the center of the Ural Mountains province where he is serving his four-year sentence. “Maybe, the death of Alexander Litvinenko, who fell victim to unpunished revenge, could force those dealing with human rights issues to finally pay attention to these facts.”
An FSB spokesman refused to comment on Trepashkin’s claim.
Litvinenko, who died in London on Nov. 23 of radiation poisoning, blamed President Vladimir Putin for his death in a deathbed letter — charges the Kremlin rejected as “sheer nonsense.”
“Alexander Litvinenko’s death made me feel angry — angry at the fact that the weak and disorganized human rights movement in Russia could neither prevent political murders nor provide protection to people persecuted by the authorities for political motives,” Trepashkin wrote in his letter.
He said he had earlier talked of the FSB’s using poisons that could be applied to a car handle, a telephone receiver, an air conditioner or elsewhere to kill a victim without leaving a trace.
Trepashkin was arrested in October 2003 and convicted on charges of divulging state secrets while investigating allegations of FSB involvement in a series of deadly apartment bombings that killed about 300 people in Moscow and two other cities in 1999. The government blamed the explosions on Chechnya-based rebels, but Litvinenko and other Kremlin critics alleged they were staged by authorities as a pretext for launching the current Chechen war.
The FSB, where Trepashkin worked until 1997, alleged that he had been recruited by British agents to collect compromising materials on the explosions with the aim of discrediting the Russian security agency.
A local court released Trepashkin in August 2005 for good behavior after he had served just under half of a four-year sentence, but another court overturned the verdict and put him back in prison about two weeks later.
Trepashkin said in his letter that after his arrest authorities had put him in a cell contaminated with poisonous chemicals and threatened to kill him. “Litvinenko and I aren’t the last in this chain of victims of persecution,” he wrote. “Maybe Litvinenko’s death could make you believe in what he was saying.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday that Moscow was ready to answer concrete questions from Britain concerning the death, Russian news agencies reported. “When the questions are formulated and sent through the existing channels, we will consider them thoroughly,” Lavrov was quoted as saying in Jordan by the ITAR-Tass news agency. “There have been no such questions yet.”
British Airways said Friday that one of its planes that has been parked at a Moscow airport would fly to London later in the day for a radiation check. The plane was among three grounded by the airline as part of the investigation into Litvinenko’s death in London last month.
Litvinenko was poisoned by the rare radioactive element, polonium 210, and investigators are looking into radioactive traces found on two other British Airways planes that have traveled the Moscow-London route since Nov. 1, when Litvinenko is believed to have been poisoned.
