Russia responsible for Alexander Litvinenko’s assassination, European court rules

The ruling found that “Russia was responsible for assassination of Aleksandr Litvinenko in the UK.””The Court found in particular that there was a strong prima facie case that, in poisoning Mr Litvinenko, Mr Lugovoi and Mr Kovtun had been acting as agents of the Russian State,” it said, referring to the names of two Russian agents accused of killing Litvinenko.The court also ruled that Russian authorities “had not carried out an effective domestic investigation capable of leading to the establishment of the facts and, where appropriate, the identification and punishment of those responsible for the murder.”The ECHR verdict supports the findings of a 2016 British In 2001 Litvinenko and his family were granted asylum in the UK, acquiring British citizenship in 2006. His widow, Marina, who now is known as Maria Anna Carter and still lives in London, brought the case to the ECHR in 2007. Litvinenko is not the first Putin critic to be allegedly poisoned. In 2018, the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were sickened by Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent, In Salisbury, England. British prosecutors charged two Russian nationals, — who have now been officially identified as officers of the Russian military intelligence service, Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin — over the poisonings that year. London Metropolitan police authorized charges against a third Russian intelligence agent, identified as Denis Sergeev, aka “Sergey Fedotov,” on Tuesday. And in August 2020, prominent opposition leader Alexey Navalny was poisoned with the same lethal nerve agent.CNN’s Anna Chernova, Seb Shukla and Lindsay Isaac contributed to this report.