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LONDON - Poisoned Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko was no spy for Britain, and such claims are no more than an attempt by the man accused of his murder to shield himself from justice, Litvinenko's widow has said in an interview.
Marina Litvinenko, who has co-authored a new book about her murdered husband, said she had taken solace in the apparent determination of British authorities to bring her husband's killer to justice.
Her husband, a former agent of Russia's FSB security service who became a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died last November of poisoning with the rare radioactive isotope Polonium 210, shortly after receiving British citizenship.
Last month, British prosecutors said they were seeking the extradition of Andrei Lugovoy, another ex-FSB agent, who left a radioactive trail across London the day Litvinenko fell ill.
At a Moscow press conference on Thursday, Lugovoy tried to turn the tables, saying he had evidence Litvinenko was a spy for Britain, and British secret services had killed him.
"This is absolutely not true," Marina Litvinenko told Reuters in an interview this weekend. "I saw my husband every day, and I didn't notice that he was a 'super agent'."
"Everything (Lugovoy) said... He's just trying to defend himself. And I just don't think it's for me to comment. Because he's the person who killed my husband."
The book, Death of a Dissident, which Marina Litvinenko co-wrote with family friend Alex Goldfarb, has passages which read like a Hollywood screenplay.
It features a cast of spies, thugs, oligarchs, terrorists, journalists and Kremlin heavies, bouncing from Chechen rebel redoubts to Moscow jail cells, to Turkish hotels, to London court rooms, to the hospital where Litvinenko wasted away.
"It's quite personal, about his life, when we meet each other and our son was born, how he changed during this time," Marina Litvinenko said. "It is quite important to understand how a person from the FSB became a dissident."
After months wondering whether anyone would be charged in the case, Marina Litvinenko said she was satisfied that British police and prosecutors were taking it seriously.
"For almost four months I wasn't sure the Crown Prosecution Service would take this decision to say exactly the name of the person who killed my husband," she said. "People said: nobody would like to spoil this relationship with Russia, because Russia is a very powerful country."
"But finally there is the accusation of Lugovoy and (the request for) his extradition. I am very satisfied."
The Kremlin is likely to see the book as a self-serving volley from the camp of Litvinenko's boss, the exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky.
It gives Berezovsky's account of how he -- as confidant of then-President Boris Yeltsin in 1999 -- selected and groomed the once obscure Putin to be Yeltin's successor, only to become the Kremlin's nemesis from his London perch.
Marina Litvinenko said she drew great strength from her 13-year-old son Tolik.
"My son is now almost like a man," she said. "When it happened he tried to support me. If he saw I am a little bit sad or maybe I am starting to cry, he would say, 'Mama are you ok?' And it gave me a little more strength to be ok."
- REUTERS
