In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was mentioned to have been jabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella in London with the connivance of the Okay.G.B. The Federal Security Service, the Okay.G.B.’s successor, was implicated in subsequent poisonings of Mr. Putin’s critics.
Mr. Litvinenko was investigating the loss of life of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, who was shot to loss of life in her Moscow house constructing the month earlier than he died.
In 2016, after a protracted demand for solutions from Mr. Litvinenko’s widow, Judge Robert Owen, who had since retired from the British High Court, delivered an unequivocal discovering: “I am sure that Mr. Lugovoy and Mr. Kovtun placed the polonium 210 in the teapot at the Pine Bar on 1 November 2006. I am sure that they did this with the intention of poisoning Mr. Litvinenko.”
Judge Owen additionally concluded that the proof “establishes a strong circumstantial case that the Russian State was responsible for Mr. Litvinenko’s death,” and that the safety service’s operation was “probably approved” by Mr. Putin.
Last 12 months, the European Court of Human Rights dominated that Russia was answerable for the killing.
Dmitry Vladimirovich Kovtun was born right into a army household on Sept. 25, 1965, in Moscow. In the Nineteen Eighties, he attended the Moscow Higher Military Command School, the place his classmates included Mr. Lugovoi. After they graduated, they served within the Okay.G.B.’s ninth directorate, which was answerable for defending the Kremlin’s high brass.
While Mr. Lugovoi turned a public determine as a member of the Russian parliament, a lot much less is thought about Mr. Kovtun’s profession path after the Soviet Union collapsed.
He and his German-born spouse, (*56*) Hohne, moved to Hamburg, the place he later claimed political asylum. The couple separated, and he returned to Moscow as a enterprise advisor after he had labored as a waiter and, Ms. Hohne was quoted as saying, aspired to behave in pornographic films.
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