Friend says poisoned Russian spy 'looks more exhausted'

LONDON -- A friend who visited poisoned former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in the intensive care ward of a London hospital Wednesday said he looked much worse and was barely able to speak.

But the hospital said Litvinenko's condition had not deteriorated and the fierce Kremlin critic was in stable condition.

"He's much worse today," Alex Goldfarb said in a telephone interview from the University College Hospital. "He's much thinner, looks more exhausted and he's finding it much more difficult to speak. He's there but he's not there."

Litvinenko, 43, is suffering from the effects of an unknown poison he believes was given to him Nov. 1.

The poison has caused his hair to fall out and damaged his immune and nervous systems.

Doctors originally blamed the toxic metal thallium, but have now said it is more likely it was something else, possibly a radioactive substance.

"He has been poisoned, so we are looking for other causes of poisoning," Dr. Amit Nathwani, who is treating Litvinenko, told reporters outside the hospital Tuesday. "But it is also quite possible that we may never find the ultimate cause."

Scotland Yard investigates

Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch is investigating the poisoning that friends and dissidents allege was carried out at the behest of the Russian government. Litvinenko sought asylum in Britain 2000 and has been a relentless critic of the Kremlin and the Russian security services.

On Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Intelligence service, the SVR, issued its strongest denial yet that it was involved in any assassination attempt.

"Litvinenko is not the kind of person for whose sake we would spoil bilateral relations," the Interfax news agency quoted Sergei Ivanov, an SVR spokesman, as saying. "It is absolutely not in our interests to be engaged in such activity."

The service declined to comment to The Associated Press.

The SVR is one of the successor agencies of the Soviet KGB. Litvinenko worked both for the KGB and for another successor, the Federal Security Service.

In 1998, he publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill tycoon Boris Berezovsky. He spent nine months in jail on charges of abuse of office but was later acquitted and moved to London.

On the day he first felt ill, Litvinenko said he had two meetings. In the morning, he met at a London hotel with an unnamed Russian and Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB colleague and bodyguard to one-time Russian Prime Minster Yegor Gaidar. Later, he dined with Italian security expert Mario Scaramella to discuss the October murder of another Kremlin critic -- investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Litvinenko had publicly blamed Moscow for involvement in Politkovskaya death, although the Kremlin has emphatically denied that.

Scaramella told reporters in Rome on Tuesday that he had traveled to meet Litvinenko to discuss an e-mail he received from a confidential source naming the killers of Politkovskaya, who was gunned down Oct. 7 at her Moscow apartment building. The e-mail also listed other potential targets, including Scaramella and Litvinenko.

Goldfarb said there was nothing out of the ordinary in Litvinenko's meeting with Lugovoy, who also worked as bodyguard to Berezovsky, the highest profile Russian exile in London and a close friend of Litvinenko and others in London's growing emigre circle.

Litvinenko has refused to implicate any of the people he met on Nov. 1 in his poisoning.

"He said there were two encounters held but he is not accusing anybody. It could have happened then or it could have happened elsewhere," Goldfarb said.

London, a growing hotspot for wealthy Russians and critics of the President Vladimir Putin, has become a beacon for Kremlin opponents wishing to pass on information on alleged government corruption and human rights abuses in Chechnya, said Goldfarb, a civil liberties campaigner.

He said Litvinenko, granted British citizenship last month, frequently met with Russians who had traveled to London with information regarding Kremlin abuses.

"He is a British citizen and was not afraid of the (Russian) government trying to do such a thing on British soil."

In 2003, a Russian newspaper reported that KGB agents poisoned Soviet defector Nikolai Khokhlov in 1957 by putting radioactive thallium in his tea while he was attending an anti-communist conference in Frankfurt. German and British doctors were able to save him.