http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1969882,00.html· Businessman's ex-wife and her children admitted
· Traces of polonium found in car used by Kovtun
Luke Harding in Berlin, Jeevan Vasagar and Tom Parfitt in Moscow
Tuesday December 12, 2006
The Guardian
A key witness to the murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko may have contaminated four other people he came into contact with, German police revealed yesterday.
Russian businessman Dmitry Kovtun, who met Mr Litvinenko on November 1, the day he was fatally poisoned, is being investigated in Germany on suspicion of illegally handling a radioactive substance.
Mr Kovtun's former wife, her two small children and her new partner had been admitted to hospital in Hamburg on a precautionary basis, police said.
German detectives said they were "more certain than ever" that Mr Kovtun had been in contact with polonium-210 before he flew to Britain. The Russian flew from Moscow to Hamburg on October 28, travelling on to London on the morning of November 1. "Kovtun was already contaminated
when he arrived in Germany," Thomas Menzel, the head of the special German unit investigating the Litvinenko affair, told a news conference in Hamburg yesterday.
He added: "We are more certain of this than on Sunday." Asked how he could be so sure, he replied: "Kovtun left traces of radiation behind in the car used to pick him up from the airport."