KGB agent working for MI6: Who is Alexander Litvinenko?
Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006 while meeting with his former friends from the Russian secret service at a hotel in London. The spy, who was understood to have been exposed to the radioactive substance polonium-210, could not be saved.
It is almost certain that Litvinenko was killed by the radioactive substance polonium-210, which was mixed into his tea by Dmitry Kovtun, a former army officer, and Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB agent, and was supposed to kill his victim without leaving a trace.
Alexander Litvinenko joined the KGB in 1980 and served in the organized crime unit. Litvinenko, who served in the institution restructured under the name of FSB in the Russian Federation until 1998, announced in a press conference that year that he received an order from his managers to kill Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, but did not fulfill it.
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko (30 August 1962 or 4 December 1962 – 23 November 2006) was a British-naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) who specialised in tackling organised crime. A prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he advised British intelligence and coined the term "mafia state".
Litvinenko, who was arrested in 1999 on charges of revealing state secrets, spent 9 months in prison. Litvinenko, who fled to England via Georgia and Turkey after being released from prison, lived as a refugee in this country until 2006.
Apartment bombings
In the book titled "Exploding Russia: Terror Within", which he wrote with Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky, Litvinenko claimed that the apartment bombings in Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September 1999, in which approximately 300 people lost their lives, were organized by the FSB.
Litvinenko argued that the then Prime Minister Putin, who blamed Chechen militants for the explosions, used them as an excuse to start the 2nd Chechen war.
Litvinenko also claimed that Putin ordered the death of opposition journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed in her home in Moscow in 2006.
The claim that Litvinenko made, which is thought to have angered Putin the most, was in his article published on the website Chechenpress in July 2006. Litvinenko accused Putin of pedophilia. As evidence for his claim, the former KGB agent showed footage of Putin kissing the belly of a boy among tourists visiting the Kremlin.
He became a Muslim in the hospital
His father, Walter Litvinenko, said that his son converted to Islam at the hospital and that his last wish was to be buried in Chechnya, according to Islamic customs.