But, after potentially explosive disclosures at a preinquest hearing last week, a more fundamental question seems to arise: Are the mysteries of his poisoning by the rare and highly toxic isotope polonium 210 approaching something akin to resolution, or are they simply condemned to deepen?
“The Alexander Litvinenko affair has been an unbelievably murky business,” The Times of London observed in an editorial. The more details become known, it said, “the murkier and muddier it seems to become.”
The hearing last week produced two major assertions that seemed to bear out that assessment.
One, by Hugh Davies, a lawyer acting for the inquest, seemed to substantiate the Litvinenko camp’s insistence that British government evidence not yet made public in detail “does establish a prima facie case as to the culpability of the Russian state in the death of Alexander Litvinenko,” who had become a British citizen weeks before his death.
The second, by Ben Emmerson, acting for Mr. Litvinenko’s wife, Marina, was that her husband was a “registered and paid agent” of Britain’s MI6 and of its Spanish counterpart, dealing with both in their investigations into Russian organized crime bosses and their links to political leaders in Moscow.
Between them, the two assertions raise tantalizing possibilities that could help fill the single biggest gap in the Litvinenko jigsaw: the question of a motive.
If Mr. Litvinenko was, as his adversaries in Russia have long maintained, a British agent, was that enough to justify a vengeful state conspiracy to silence or, at the least, make an example of him? Or does the Spanish connection offer a more plausible line of inquiry?
In 2010, American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks described the conclusions of a Spanish prosecutor, José Grinda González, in support of Mr. Litvinenko’s oft-voiced belief that the Russian security and intelligence services “control organized crime in Russia.” Was that the trigger for a killing?
“By passing on damaging secrets to Spain,” the columnist Kim Sengupta wrote in The Independent, “Mr. Litvinenko would have become a target for crime bosses who would have been able to use government agents to silence him.”
But that is where the story crosses into a world of flawed loyalties and double-dealing more familiar to the readers of a certain genre of novels. As the hearing revealed last week, in late 2006, Mr. Litvinenko had been about to embark on a journey to Spain to tell investigators about bonds between the Russian mafia and the Kremlin — a follow-up, according to an authoritative account in the Spanish newspaper El País, to a secret visit in May 2006, during which he provided critical information about Russian organized crime bosses. Months later, he was dead.
The twist in the latest disclosures was this: His companion on the second voyage was to have been another alumnus of the K.G.B., Andrei K. Lugovoi, a successful Russian businessman, who just happens to be the person British prosecutors have accused of poisoning Mr. Litvinenko.
By his own account, Mr. Lugovoi was present with several other Russians in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London’s Grosvenor Square on Nov. 1, 2006, when Mr. Litvinenko ingested polonium, traces of which were later found on a teapot he had apparently used.
The two had met months before Mr. Litvinenko’s death, sharing an interest in the business of risk analysis, consultancy and information gathering in a world familiar to both of them.
In the years immediately after Mr. Litvinenko’s death, it was possible to cast it, as British prosecutors did, simply as the murder of a British citizen by a foreigner. (Mr. Lugovoi denies killing Mr. Litvinenko, and Russia has refused to send him to Britain to stand trial, citing constitutional prohibitions on the extradition of its own citizens.) After the latest assertions, however, the case shifted to a far more ominous plane — the alleged state killing of a state agent, a conspiracy on foreign soil, a throwback to the cold war.
Those considerations may be enough for both Moscow and London to try to draw back from the brink of a deeper freeze in the interests of cooperation in other areas, not least Russian energy and British investment.
The revelations at the preinquest hearing “threaten further to chill diplomatic relations between London and the Kremlin,” the editorial in The Times of London said, offering the harder-nosed view that it was “vital that relations between Moscow and London should not be held hostage to the Litvinenko case.”
Geopolitics apart, there has been another subplot.
Since the moment of her husband’s death, Mrs. Litvinenko has seemed to blend discomfort at her presence in the glare of news media coverage with a fierce determination to use her prominence there to push for justice and closure.
Yet, just as her campaign seems to be nearing a climax, she finds herself “in dire need of money to pay her lawyers,” said Alex Goldfarb a close associate of the Litvinenkos.
Previously the couple’s longtime sponsor had been the self-exiled entrepreneur Boris A. Berezovsky, a fiery foe of the Kremlin who fled Moscow in 2000 and has spent part of his time and money since then promoting President Vladimir V. Putin’s enemies.
But, since Mr. Berezovsky lost an astronomically expensive court case in London to a fellow tycoon, Roman A. Abramovich, this summer, his spending has been scaled back.
As Luke Harding, the author of critical book about the Moscow leadership, wrote in The Guardian, quoting an unidentified friend of Mr. Berezovsky, “Ironically, what the Kremlin could not do in a decade — shutting down Boris’s anti-Putin London operation — was done by a decision of an English court.”
