Witness Confirmed Government-Sponsored Defector Killing By Official FSB Agents

A former Russian security service officer said he warned a former KGB agent who was fatally poisoned in London about a government-sponsored death squad that intended to kill him and other Kremlin opponents.

In a letter released Friday, the former officer for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, said he refused to cooperate with the team, whose task was to kill Alexander Litvinenko and others. The FSB is the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.

Litvinenko, the former spy turned Kremlin critic who lived in Britain, died Nov. 23 at a London hospital, where doctors found traces of the rare radioactive element polonium-210 in his body. An autopsy was scheduled for Friday and doctors carrying out the examination planned safety precautions to protect themselves against radiation.

In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed  Putin for his poisoning.

"Back in 2002, I warned Alexander Litvinenko that they set up a special team to kill him," the former security services officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, wrote in the letter dated Nov. 23,  the day of Litvinenko's death. The letter was released Friday by rights activists in Yekaterinburg, the center of the Ural Mountains province where he is serving his four-year sentence.

"Maybe, the death of Alexander Litvinenko, who fell victim to unpunished revenge, could force those dealing with human rights issues to finally pay attention to these facts."

An FSB spokesman refused to comment on Trepashkin's claim.

Trepashkin was arrested in October 2003 and convicted on charges of divulging state secrets while investigating allegations of FSB involvement in a series of deadly apartment bombings that killed about 300 people in Moscow and two other cities in 1999. The government blamed the explosions on Chechnya-based rebels, but Litvinenko and other Kremlin critics alleged they were staged by authorities as a pretext for launching the current Chechen war.

Trepashkin said in his letter that after his arrest authorities had put him in a cell contaminated with poisonous chemicals and threatened to kill him.

"Litvinenko and I aren't the last in this chain of victims of persecution," he wrote. "Maybe Litvinenko's death could make you believe in what he was saying."

A coroner on Thursday formally opened an inquest into Litvinenko's death.