Litvinenko was not an MI6 agent, says widow

The widow of poisoned former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko says he was not working for British intelligence, as his alleged killer claims.

Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB man sought on a murder charge in Britain, said last week in Moscow that Litvinenko was working for MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency.

"He will try everything to defend himself," Marina Litvinenko said.

British authorities are seeking Lugovoy's extradition to face trial in London, but Russian officials say their constitution bars extradition of Russian citizens.

They have left open the option of a Russian trial based on evidence provided by British authorities.

British intelligence officials have also dismissed the allegations made by Lugovoy that Litvinenko, a fierce critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, worked for them, or that he attempted to recruit Lugovoy to gather compromising materials about Putin.

Marina Litvinenko said her husband - who had been an intelligence officer tackling organised crime - carried out intelligence work on behalf of British businesses but had never been employed by the foreign intelligence service.

"There was no point (at which) I thought he had any job with MI6," said Marina, 45.

"I have got one accusation about Lugovoy - it was exactly him that killed my husband."

Litvinenko, 43, spent three agonising weeks in hospital after ingesting the rare radioactive isotope polonium-210. Shortly before dying of organ failure on November 23, Litvinenko accused Putin of directing the killing.

Lugovoy had no personal motive for killing Litvinenko but instead acted on behalf the Russian state, his widow said.

"He was not an enemy of my husband at all but my husband was killed by polonium-210. It's not easy to buy. It's not easy to take. It means only a state stays behind this poisoning," she said.

Litvinenko had accused Russian authorities of being behind the October killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the deadly 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that stoked support for Russia's second invasion of Chechnya.

Russia brands such claims as baseless and ridiculous, and its top diplomat Sergey Lavrov said on Friday that relations with Britain were becoming frayed by London's "politicising" of the case.

Lugovoy's claims that Litvinenko and another Putin critic, self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, were British agents are not new, said Alex Goldfarb, author of a new book about the case.

Marina Litvinenko agreed to an interview on Friday, on condition that it not be released until the weekend as part of the publicity for Goldfarb's book, titled Death of a Dissident.

Goldfarb said the "totally absurd" allegations are four years old and were used in an indictment against another former agent Mikhail Trepashkin - currently serving a four-year sentence at a prison colony in the Ural Mountains for revealing state secrets.

"This has all the hallmarks of a classic KGB operation - both the murder itself and the cover-up and disinformation that follows," Goldfarb said.

Mrs Litvinenko said she believed her husband was killed because of his close relationship with Berezovsky - a one-time ally of Putin and now one of his most prominent political foes.

Russian authorities have unsuccessfully sought Berezovsky's extradition to face charges of economic crimes. Berezovsky says the charges are politically motivated.

Mrs Litvinenko said the north London home where the family had lived is still polluted with polonium and she has no idea when she and the couple's 13-year-old son Anatoly can return.

The former dance instructor said she was proud of her husband's denunciations of alleged human rights abuses in Russia and would carry on speaking out until her husband's killer is brought to justice.

"I can't live without this hope," she said, with tears forming in her eyes. "Maybe it will never happen but for me it's very important to believe it will happen."