Litvinenko suspect will not be extradited

Russia has refused Britain’s request to extradite a suspect in the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning case, news reports said today.

Russian prosecutors have officially refused Britain’s request to extradite a businessman accused in last year’s fatal poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian news agency reported today.

Interfax cited what it said was an informed source as saying the Prosecutor General’s refusal to turn over Andrei Lugovoy was based on a constitutional prohibition against turning over Russian citizens to foreign nations.

Officials in the Prosecutor General’s office could not be immediately reached to comment on the report. In London, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Foreign Office both said they were looking into the report.

In May, Britain accused Lugovoy, a former KGB agent-turned-businessman, of involvement in the killing of Litvinenko, who died in a London hospital in November from a fatal dose of the radioactive substance polonium 210.

President Vladimir Putin has said publicly that extraditing Russian citizens would be a violation of the Constitution.

Russian authorities, meanwhile, have tried to turn the tables on Britain by opening their own investigation into allegations of British espionage made by Lugovoy, who also said British secret services and a self-exiled billionaire tycoon could have had a hand in Litvinenko’s death.

The case has soured relations between London and Moscow.