Putin Says British Extradition Call: “Stupidity”
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
MOSCOW (AP) – Britain’s call for the extradition of a suspect in the killing of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko is “stupidity,” President Vladimir Putin said in an interview released Monday.
Mr. Putin’s harsh characterization is likely to further trouble British-Russian relations that already have hit a post-Cold War low amid the controversy of the killing of Litvinenko, who died in London in November from poisoning by a rare radioactive isotope.
Britain last month said it had enough evidence to charge Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian businessman and former KGB member who had met with Litvinenko shortly before he fell ill, in the killing and asked for his extradition. Russian officials say the constitution prevents such extraditions.
Mr. Putin said British officials should have known that Russia’s constitution would prevent the extradition.
“From whatever side you look at this problem, there’s one stupidity,” Mr. Putin said in an interview with journalists from Group of Eight countries ahead of this week’s G-8 summit in Germany.
“If they didn’t know (about the constitutional prohibition) it’s a low level of competence and thus we have doubts about what they’re doing there,” Mr. Putin said, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin. “And if they knew and did this, it’s simply politics.
“This is bad and that is bad – from all sides it’s the same stupidity,” Mr. Putin said.
Mr. Lugovoi has said Litvinenko was working for MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, and that British intelligence may have had a hand in the slaying.
Mr. Lugovoi has claimed Litvinenko tried to recruit him to work for MI6 and to gather compromising materials about Mr. Putin and his family. He also claimed exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky – a friend of Litvinenko’s and a fellow Kremlin critic – was working for British intelligence.
Mr. Lugovoi also suggested that Mr. Berezovsky may have been behind Litvinenko’s killing, purportedly for having evidence that Mr. Berezovsky had received asylum under false pretenses. Mr. Berezovsky has denied the allegations.
British intelligence officials have dismissed the allegations by Mr. Lugovoi that Litvinenko, a fierce critic of Mr. Putin, worked for them.
