Poisoned Litvinenko Blames Kremlin in Last Interview Before Death — Paper

Mos News
Nov. 25, 2006

In his last interview the poisoned former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko said that the hit on him had been ordered from the Kremlin, The Times daily reported on Friday.

“I want to survive, just to show them,” Alexander Litvinenko said in an exclusive interview given just hours before he died.

The former Russian security officer suggested that he knew he may not win his struggle against the lethal chemicals destroying his vital organs. But he said the campaign for truth would go on with or without him.

“The bastards got me,” he whispered. “But they won’t get everybody.”

Mr Litvinenko, 43, uttered his last defiant words to Andrei Nekrasov, a friend and film-maker, who had visited him in University College Hospital in London every day this week.

Although Mr Nekrasov had seen Mr Litvinenko sometimes more than once a day, Tuesday was the last occasion on which his friend could communicate properly. Yet in his final remarks, the former spy remained defiant in his battle against President Putin and the Russian security services.

He also managed a joke at his own expense, suggesting that his poisoning was proof that his campaign against the Kremlin had targeted the right people. “This is what it takes to prove one has been telling the truth,” he said.

He was referring to allegations he made in a book, The FSB Blows up Russia, which accuses the Russian security services of causing a series of apartment block explosions in Moscow in 1999 that helped to propel Vladimir Putin into the presidency.