The Russian government supported the murder of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, it was reported last night.
A senior security official told BBC's Newsnight there were "very strong indications it was a state action" and that the Russian security services continued to have a "willingness to consider operations against people in the west".
Litvinenko, a fierce critic of the former Russian president Vladimir Putin, died from polonium poisoning in London in 2006. Scotland Yard named the former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi as their prime suspect, but he has always denied any involvement.
Last year, the CPS issued an extradition warrant to bring Lugovoi back to the UK from Russia, but Putin refused to hand him over, saying it would be in breach of his country's constitution to do so.
Newsnight said it was told Russia's internal security organisation, the FSB, operated with far more autonomy than organisations usually entrusted with foreign espionage operations.
The source said: "We very strongly believe the Litvinenko case to have had some state involvement."
The source used an MI5 operation last summer in which officers arrested and deported a man they believed to be on a mission to kill another Russian dissident, Boris Berezovsky, as an example of "continued FSB willingness to consider operations against people in the west".
A Kremlin spokesman, Sergei Prikhodko, suggested today the timing of the report was not coincidental. "We are working to bring Russian-British relations out of what is to a large degree a dead-end and such leaks and citations demonstrate that not everybody in Britain is in the mood for such constructive work as we felt the prime minister himself is," he said.
Downing Street refused to be drawn on the claims. "The police carried out their investigation. The Crown Prosecution Service issued a warrant. That warrant is still outstanding," a spokesman said.
The accusations of tacit state involvement in a murder on UK soil come at an awkward time for Anglo-Russian relations. As part of the fallout over the rejected extradition warrant, the British government expelled four Russian diplomats.
In a retaliatory gesture, Moscow expelled four diplomats working at the UK mission and the country's foreign ministry forced the closure of two British Council offices.
In December 2006, the Anglo-Dutch oil company, Shell, was pressured into selling a majority stake in its operations in the country to the state-controlled energy group Gazprom.
BP, now the only major oil company in the country partially controlled by foreigners, has found itself under siege from Russian partners trying to control the boardroom.
Yesterday, Gordon Brown held his first face-to-face talks with the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, at the G8 summit in Japan.
He is reported to have brought up the Litvinenko case with his opposite number, but made little headway in the matter, nor was there any sign that relations between the two countries were thawing. The latest claims will have done little to improve the relationship.
Last November, the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, expressed concern that there had been "no decrease" in the number of Russian covert intelligence officers operating in the UK since the end of the Cold War. The service believes there are around 30 operating from Russian diplomatic missions here.
Source: Agencies
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