Murder Suspect Unrepentant in Moscow

To Britain, he’s a wanted man, a murderer responsible for a diplomatic crisis. To Russia, he’s a respected, successful politician. So it was an unrepentant Andrei Lugovoi who sat down with the Guardian’s Luke Harding. The ex-KGB man insists he did not poison dissident Alexander Litvinenko by placing radioactive polonium in his tea. Instead, he sees himself as a victim. 

“I've always said I can't remember whether I ordered tea,” he says. He denies that anything sinister took place during his fateful 2006 meeting in London with Litvinenko, who Lugovoi thinks was “definitely an agent of the English.” But Lugovoi himself was never a spy, he says, only a drill instructor. “People make me out to be some kind of KGB monster. Thank you, British press.” (More Alexander Litvinenko stories.)