page_title: Alexander Litvinenko
section_title: Death and last statement
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander Litvinenko / Poisoning and death / Death and last statement
caption_attribution_description: English: The grave of Alexander Litvinyenko in the West End of Highgate Cemetery, London Borough of Islington.
context_page_description: Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was a British-naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian FSB secret service who specialised in tackling organized crime. According to US diplomats, Litvinenko coined the phrase Mafia state.
  In November 1998, Litvinenko and several other FSB officers publicly accused their superiors of ordering the assassination of the Russian tycoon and oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Litvinenko was arrested the following March on charges of exceeding the authority of his position. He was acquitted in November 1999 but re-arrested before the charges were again dismissed in 2000. He fled with his family to London and was granted asylum in the United Kingdom, where he worked as a journalist, writer and consultant for the British intelligence services.
  During his time in Boston, Lincolnshire, Litvinenko wrote two books, Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within and Lubyanka Criminal Group, wherein he accused the Russian secret services of staging the Russian apartment bombings and other terrorism acts in an effort to bring Vladimir Putin to power. He also accused Putin of ordering the murder in October 2006 of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
context_section_description: Before his death, Litvinenko said: "You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world, Mr. Putin, will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life." On 22 November 2006, Litvinenko's medical staff at University College Hospital reported Litvinenko had suffered a "major setback" due to either heart failure or an overnight heart attack. He died on 23 November. The following day, Putin publicly stated: “Mr Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus”.
  Scotland Yard stated that inquiries into the circumstances of how Litvinenko became ill would continue.
  On 24 November 2006, a posthumous statement was released, in which Litvinenko named Putin as the man behind his poisoning. Litvinenko's friend Alex Goldfarb, who was also the chairman of Boris Berezovsky's Civil Liberties Fund, claimed Litvinenko had dictated it to him three days earlier. Andrei Nekrasov said his friend Litvinenko and Litvinenko's lawyer had composed the statement in Russian on 21 November's and translated it to English.
  Putin disputed the authenticity of this note while attending a Russia-EU summit in Helsinki and claimed it was being used for political purposes. Goldfarb later stated that Litvinenko, on his deathbed, had instructed him to write a note "in good English" in which Putin was to be accused of his poisoning. Goldfarb also stated that he read the note to Litvinenko in English and Russian and Litvinenko agreed "with every word of it" and signed it.
  His autopsy took place on 1 December at the Royal London Hospital's institute of pathology. It was attended by three physicians, including one chosen by the family and one from the Foreign Office. Litvinenko was buried at Highgate Cemetery (West side) in north London on 7 December. The police treated his death as a murder, although the London coroner's inquest was yet to be completed.
  In an interview with the BBC broadcast on 16 December 2006, Yuri Shvets said that Litvinenko had created a 'due diligence' report investigating the activities of an unnamed senior Kremlin official on behalf of a British company looking to invest "dozens of millions of dollars" in a project in Russia, and that the dossier contained damaging information about the senior Kremlin official. He said he was interviewed about his allegations by Scotland Yard detectives investigating Litvinenko's murder. British media reported that the poisoning and consequent death of Litvinenko was not widely covered in the Russian news media.
caption: Litvinenko's grave in 2017.
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