London – A former KGB agent turned Kremlin critic who was poisoned three weeks ago was moved into intensive care Monday after his condition deteriorated, and his doctor said the toxin has attacked his bone marrow.
Col. Alexander Litvinenko was under armed guard at a London hospital, as authorities investigated the poisoning that has all the hallmarks of a Cold War thriller.
Doctors said Litvinenko was seriously ill after being given the deadly poison thallium – a toxic metal found in some types of rat poison that can cause damage to the nervous system and organ failure.
Litvinenko, a thorn in the Russian government’s side since the late 1990s, fell ill after a meal with a contact who claimed to have details about the slaying of another Kremlin critic – Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who was gunned down Oct. 7 in her Moscow apartment building.
“Permission to assassinate abroad can only be given from the top,” Oleg Gordievsky, former deputy head of the KGB at the Soviet Embassy in London, told The Associated Press.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed suggestions that Russian intelligence services were involved as “nothing but sheer nonsense.”
