Russian investigators have opened a criminal case into a murder attempt against Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB bodyguard who was accused of poisoning Russian security service defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in London, a police source said on Wednesday.
“The decision about opening the case has been recently made,” the source said.
No official comment is available. Lugovoi has declined to comment on the issue.
Litvinenko, a former KGB officer and outspoken critic of then-president Vladimir Putin, died in November 2006 in a London hospital after being poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium-210.
British investigators have until now accused Lugovoi of the murder and demanded his extradition, sparking a major diplomatic row between the two countries.
Russia has rejected British requests to extradite Lugovoi, citing its Constitution, which does not permit the extradition of Russian nationals. The row led to a drastic deterioration in bilateral relations. Lugovoi has denied all the charges.
Experts believe that Lugovoi, who gained immunity from prosecution after joining Russia's right-wing LDPR party, could have concocted the story about a murder attempt against him.
“Any information about a murder attempt on a politician ahead of the polls inevitably benefits him politically,” Alexei Mukhin, the head of the Center for Political Information said. “I have no doubt that the information about his murder attempt and the case opened into it is a thoroughly planned PR campaign.”
