Russia was responsible for the 2006 assassination of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has found. Former Russian spy Litvinenko, who had become an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and had defected to Britain, died after being poisoned with a rare radioactive substance in London in 2006. A public inquiry in the UK found in 2016 that two Russian men—Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun—had deliberately poisoned Litvinenko by putting polonium-210 into his drink at a London hotel, leading to an agonising death. The British inquiry, led by the former high court judge Sir Robert Owen, concluded that the murder had “probably” been carried out with Putin’s approval. In a statement issued on Tuesday, the European court said it had found that “there was a strong prima facie case that, in poisoning Mr. Litvinenko, Mr. Lugovoy and Mr. Kovtun had been acting …
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