RUSSIA ‘POISON’ SPY PICKED FOR NOVICHOK PROBE
Man thought to be a killer is on Navalny investigation
A RUSSIAN spy accused of murdering ex-KGB man Alexander Litvinenko will play a major role in the “investigation” into Moscow’s latest poison attack on a critic.
Andrei Lugovoy is now high up in Moscow’s Security and AntiCorruption committee, the body believed to be probing the attack on Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Navalny took his first steps this week after leaving his hospital bed, where he was treated for a Sovietstyle poisoning.
He had collapsed in agony on a flight to Moscow and was airlifted to Berlin, where he remained in hospital in a coma for weeks.
Doctors found he had been poisoned by the nerve agent novichok, which can only have come from Russia and was used in the Salisbury poisoning of Sergei Skripal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is under pressure from Western countries to approve an investigation into Navalny’s poisoning, and the Mirror has learned Lugovoy will be a key decision-maker in it.
Lugovoy was named as one of Litvinenko’s attackers by a British judge, and the investigation expected to be a whitewash.
As a deputy in the State Duma Committee on Security and AntiCorruption, alleged KGB assassin turned politician Lugovoy has already denounced the Navalny poisoning as an attack by Western intelligence services.
His shameless involvement in the Navalny probe links two assassinations by Russian spooks.
The 2006 murder of Litvinenko in London, using radioactive polonium, highlighted Moscow’s assassinations on foreign soil.
Like Litvinenko, Navalny is has bravely spoken out against the corruption that is rife throughout Russia and leads all the way up to the Kremlin.
But unlike Litvinenko, a whistleblower ex-spy, opposition leader Navalny has survived to carry on campaigning.
Litvinenko is thought to have been killed in an elaborate plot by ex-colleagues Lugovoy and fellow spy Dmitry Kovtun.
A UK security source told the Mirror Lugovoy’s involvement in the probe is intended to display “arrogant disregard for the West”.
They added: “It also acts as a threat, displaying a brutal readiness to resort to very cruel violence and murder.”
Meanwhile Navalny’s bank accounts were frozen and his Moscow flat seized as part of a lawsuit, his spokeswoman said yesterday. Navalny is in a longrunning dispute with a catering firm, Moscow Schoolchild.