MOSCOW. March 12 (Interfax) - Russian parliamentarian Andrei Lugovoi, who has been accused by the UK authorities of involvement in the poisoning of ex-security service officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, has said that he will not take part in the Litvinenko death trial.
"I have come to the conclusion that the UK authorities will not give me any chance to prove that I am not guilty and I will be unable to get a fair trial in the United Kingdom," Lugovoi said at a press conference at the Interfax central office.
"I have run out of hope to see a fair trial in the UK. I no longer believe in the very possibility of an impartial investigation of this case in the UK. I have to announce that I am quitting the Coroners' inquest. I will not take part in it," he said.
Lugovoi said he wanted the trial to be open to the public. However, given the presence of several classified documents, court sessions where these documents will appear will be held behind closed doors, he said.
"The chance of getting an in-depth unbiased inquiry is approaching zero. It is unclear how it is possible to protect oneself and prove wrong the arguments that no one is going to declassify. It is not clear who will assess the authenticity of these secret facts if neither I nor the public ever find them out, how one can play with open cards if the adversary, represented by the UK Foreign Office, is not going to show his cards. It is not difficult to guess who will lose and whose reputation will be smeared in the end," Lugovoi said.
Lugovoi said that judging by his copy of the London police report dealing with Litvinenko's death, it was possible to conclude that "the polonium trail leads not from Moscow to London, but from London to Moscow."
These documents "reveal the true goal of this case - the goal of accusing Russia of Litvinenko's death and state terrorism with the use radioactive materials," he said.
"The motive in this case remains as far-fetched as it was five years ago. Investigators in London simply repeated the same scary tales about Russia that appeared in the UK press in 2007," Lugovoi said.
"Litvinenko is not Trotsky. Litvinenko was not so important to make special services chase him with an ice-axe in their hands all over the world," he said.
Lugovoi said that in 2006 he had a ten-year-old private security firm and was a well-off person.
Lugovoi said that looking at the documents available to him, he concluded that investigators had analyzed just one theory linked to Litvinenko's death.
Former Federal Security Service officer Litvinenko, who fled to the UK in 2000, died in November 2006 soon after meeting his former colleagues Andrei Lugovoi, Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko. Traces of the radioactive element polonium 210 were found in Litvinenko's body. The UK authorities accused Lugovoi of involvement in the incident and demanded his extradition, which was denied by Russia.
Lugovoi and businessmen Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko met with Litvinenko three weeks prior to his death, while they were in London. The British authorities have demanded that Russia extradite Lugovoi. Russia denied this request since the Russian Constitution prohibits extradition of a Russian citizen to another country. Lugovoi denied any involvement in Litvinenko's death.
Lugovoi passed a British Polygraph Association lie-detector test in April 2012.
In December 2006, the Russian Prosecutor's General Office opened a criminal case on Litvinenko's murder and attempt at Kovtun's life. Kovtun has been examined in Moscow amid the radioactive contamination. Kovtun said that he could have "brought traces of Polonium-210 to Hamburg from London where he met A. Litvinenko on October 16-18."
Litvinenko's death has led to aggravation of the Russian-UK relations. London has unilaterally frozen a number of important spheres of bilateral cooperation.
The preliminary hearings of the Litvinenko case began in London on October 13, 2011. The court has ruled to close hearings for public and media.
In December 2012, Lugovoi said that he expected the British court considering the case to check the involvement of businessman Boris Berezovsky in Litvinenko's death.
"Thank God, the British court has finally ruled that the involvement of Berezovsky will be tried at the hearing as well, because Berezovsky's involvement has been pointed out not only by Lugovoi, but by Ramzan Kadyrov as well as Walter Litvinenko [A. Litvinenko's father]," Lugovoi said at a State Duma session then.
Lugovoi said that at the court session in December 2012 lawyers of the Litvinenko family "have finally acknowledged that Litvinenko worked for MI6 and was employee of the British intelligence, receiving a monthly 2,000 pounds on a joint account with his wife, as well for Spanish special services on the order of the British intelligence."
A number of British media reports have said that the coroner, Judge Robert Owen, who is leading the inquest into Litvinenko's death, might delay the main hearings scheduled for May.