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BERLIN - Dimitry Kovtun, a Russian contact of the murdered former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, left substantial traces of radioactive polonium in Hamburg and may have poisoned his ex-wife and her two children with it, German police disclosed yesterday.
Kovtun's former wife, German Marina Wall, 31, and her two children, aged 1 and 3, were being tested for radioactive contamination in a Hamburg hospital together with Wall's male companion.
German investigators said they had found polonium traces on all four after carrying out an extensive search of Wall's Hamburg apartment, where Kovtun, 41, spent the night on a sofa at the end of October before flying to London to meet Litvinenko on November 1. Litvinenko was taken ill the same day.
Polonium-210 traces were also found in a bath and on a sofa in the apartment. Further traces of the substance were found in a car used by Kovtun, on a residence permit he handed to the Hamburg city authorities at the end of October and in the home of his ex-wife's mother, which he visited during the same period.
State prosecutors said they were assuming that Kovtun had carried polonium into Germany from Moscow when he arrived on October 28 and appeared to rule out the other possibility, that the substance was inside his body and he had left traces of it on objects by sweating.
Andrei Lugovoy, a business associate of Kovtun, who was questioned by British and Russian police.
The author Frederick Forsyth said yesterday that if he had gone to his publisher with such a plotline, "I think my publisher would have advised me to drop it and stick to something realistic".
- INDEPENDENT
