The Litvinenko Inquiry

The Litvinenko Inquiry
Police interviews
3.130 The Metropolitan Police Service conducted lengthy interviews with Mr Litvinenko for
the first three days that he was at UCH. The interviews took place in four sessions.
The first session was very early in the morning on 18 November – from midnight until
2.45am; this would have been only a few hours after Mr Litvinenko arrived at UCH.
The second session took place at the end of the same day, from 7.24pm to 11.49pm.
The third and fourth sessions took place in the late afternoon and evening of 19 and
20 November respectively.
3.131 The senior of the two interviewing officers, Detective Inspector (DI) Hyatt, gave oral
evidence to the Inquiry. 160
3.132 The interviews were transcribed and I adduced the entirety of the transcripts into
evidence. It is, to put it mildly, unusual when inquiring into a death to have available
lengthy transcripts of interviews with the deceased conducted shortly before his death.
I regard these transcripts as being of great value to this Inquiry.
Mr Litvinenko’s own explanation for his illness
3.133 It would appear that Mr Litvinenko was alive to the possibility that he had been
deliberately poisoned from the first days of his illness. Mr Prikazchikov recalled that
Marina Litvinenko asked him whether Mr Litvinenko might have been poisoned when
he visited the house, probably on 3 November. 161 Mr Zakayev recalled discussing with
Mr Litvinenko the possibility that he had been poisoned on either 4 or 5 November. 162
3.134 Who did Mr Litvinenko think might have poisoned him? At the first of his police
interviews, in the early hours of 18 November, Mr Litvinenko told DI Hyatt that one
of three people must have been the poisoner. 163 The three men that he named were
Mario Scaramella, with whom he had eaten at itsu during the early afternoon of
1 November, and Andrey Lugovy and Dmitri Kovtun, whom he had met later that day
in the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel. Mr Litvinenko told DI Hyatt something else.
He said that, although he had spoken publicly about his meeting with Mr Scaramella
on 1 November, he had deliberately not said anything in public about his meeting with
Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun. 164 His explanation to DI Hyatt, put shortly, was that he
hoped that Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun might be sufficiently confident that they were
not suspects to return to London, where they could be arrested. In his oral evidence to
me Mr Zakayev stated that this was a strategy that he and Mr Litvinenko had devised
together. 165
3.135 Shortly before Mr Litvinenko left Barnet Hospital, probably on 17 November, he gave
an interview to the journalist David Leppard. Mr Leppard wrote an article on the basis
of the interview which appeared in the Sunday Times on Sunday 19 November. I
admitted both a transcript of the interview and a copy of the article into evidence. 166
It is apparent from those documents that Mr Litvinenko implied to Mr Leppard that he
thought he had been poisoned by Mr Scaramella; he did not mention Mr Lugovoy or
Mr Kovtun at all. The strategy that Mr Litvinenko described to DI Hyatt in his subsequent
interview would appear to explain what would otherwise be a puzzling omission.
160
Hyatt 4/137-170; 5/1-55
161
Prikazchikov 17/114 lines 16-20
162
Zakayev 26/153
163
INQ002470 (page 14)
164
INQ002470 (pages 12-13)
165
Zakayev 26/154-155
166
INQ016789; INQ018413
40