LONDON — British authorities said Sunday that they were widening their investigation of the poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko on the heels of a fresh series of leads into the Russian's murky political and business connections stretching from Moscow to the U.S.
"Over the next few days, I think all of these things will widen out a little from the circle just being here in Britain," Home Secretary John Reid told the "Sunday Live With Adam Boulton" program of Britain's Sky News.
Quoting unidentified law enforcement sources, British news reports said police investigators were in the U.S. interviewing former KGB agent Yuri Shvets, who purportedly has information on a dossier Litvinenko had in his possession relating to the Kremlin's pursuit of figures connected with Yukos Oil Co.
The company was forcibly broken up and in effect renationalized in 2004 after Russian authorities imprisoned its chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. One of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's closest lieutenants, KGB veteran Igor Sechin, became board chairman of the state-owned company that later took over Yukos.
In Moscow, British investigators were said to be planning to interview another former KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoy, who recently traveled to London from Moscow and met with Litvinenko on the day of his suspected poisoning. Lugovoy was among those Litvinenko was said to have suspected. "We can't go into detail on operational matters, but obviously the investigators will go wherever needed," a police spokeswoman said Sunday.
Although Litvinenko in the days before his death Nov. 23 accused the Kremlin of responsibility for the large dose of radioactive polonium-210 that is believed to have killed him, police are exploring a growing number of leads, some relating to Litvinenko's investigative work on the shadowy world of Russian and Chechen organized crime, wealthy Russian oligarchs and international politics.
In a first-person account and interview provided to Britain's Observer newspaper, a Russian academic researching a book on Chechnya said she had met Litvinenko several times over the last year and learned he had accumulated secret and damaging dossiers from the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB known as the FSB, on a number of influential figures that he planned to use for blackmailing purposes.
