In These New Times

Newsnight claimed to have exclusive confirmation, via ‘sources’ in MI5, that Alexander Litvinenko’s radiation poisoning in November 2006, had been carried out by Russian intelligence. Well, well. It offered nothing more than a few random, unattributed quotations, to assert what had been a favoured – if never corroborated – view since the start.

Now I assume, to give the reporter the benefit of the doubt, that his ‘sources’ are known to him and reliable, otherwise he would not have made such a big deal out of their assertions. And no one would expect MI5 to go on camera.

But the only person Newsnight produced In support of its new, supposedly exclusive, theory was, well, who else? but the very same Boris Berezovsky, who rehearsed the selfsame story he had peddled to the media a year ago, about how he had been targeted by an assassin at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane.

This time, Newsnight told us, in breathless excitement, the would-be assassin was a man of Chechen appearance, already named (but not arrested) in connection with the murder of the campaigning journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. He had been apprehended by the London police, but then released, without charge, to return to Russia!

Newsnight offered no explanation, nor has Berezovsky offered any, of why the police released the supposed assassin rather than charging him and putting him on trial.

Yet this needs an explanation. An arrest and trial would offer the best possible corroboration of the theory that the Russian state was involved in both the killing of Litvinenko and the alleged attempted killing of Berezovsky. Yet, even as they tried to make the case for the extradition from Moscow of Litvinenko’s presumed assassin, Andrei Lugovoi, and made a diplomatic incident out of Russia’s refusal, the British seem calmly to have let Berezovsky’s would-be assassin go. Why?

Put the Newsnight feature together with the British intelligence report – conveniently released on the eve of the Brown-Medvedev meeting – that Russia was now the third- biggest threat to British security after al-Qa’ida and Iran(!), and you have a concerted attempt to sabotage the improvement in British-Russian relations that the Brown-Medvedev encounter might have heralded.

For all the hype, there was nothing new in the Newsnight report. It smacked rather of an elaborate – and hugely successful – put-up job by Berezovsky and his PR people to reheat old accusations and pre-empt any improvement in British-Russia relations. I wonder in whose interests that might be?

I would have expected a more critical approach to the source material by a programme such as Newsnight.