Poisoned-spy case tests Europe's cross-border cooperation

British police have been pounding Moscow pavement for over a week. Russian detectives are headed for London, while a Scotland Yard liaison arrived Monday in Hamburg. On Tuesday, Interpol got into the act.

They're all pursuing clues – and, perhaps, very different agendas – in last month's fatal poisoning of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. But as the international probe expands, the players – and clues – are often at odds, complicating a case that demands considerable cross- border cooperation.

"This story is becoming so strange that it almost seems these traces of polonium and other clues are being deliberately scattered all around for some reason," says Dmitri Suslov, an expert with the independent Council on Foreign Relations and Defense Policy in Moscow. "It all plays into a very tense situation in Russia's relations with the West, and in Russia's own domestic political scene."

On Tuesday, Interpol, the international police organization, joined the expanding probe. "Cooperation through Interpol channels has already started, as several countries are involved in this case," Timur Lakhonin, the head of Interpol's Russia division, told the official RIA-Novosti news agency.

As the radioactive trail of polonium has spread to Germany, investigators have found the strongest indication yet that the substance may have originated in Russia. German authorities are investigating whether businessman Dmitri Kovtun transported polonium from Moscow via Hamburg, to London, where he met with Mr. Litvinenko on Nov. 1.

Hamburg police have found polonium traces on a BMW that picked up Mr. Kovtun at the airport when he arrived Oct. 28. It also turned up in his mother-in-law's home, on a file he handled at the Hamburg immigration office, a couch where he slept in his ex-wife's apartment, and on the clothing of her boyfriend.

"There is a reasonable basis for suspicion that he may not be just a victim, but could also be a perpetrator," said German prosecutor Martin Köhnke. Kovtun's ex-wife, her two children, and her boyfriend have been hospitalized for radiation tests.

Kovtun is being treated for polonium poisoning at a Moscow radiation clinic, as is another Russian who took part in that meeting, ex-KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi. Both men have denied any wrongdoing, and both have been questioned in the past week by Russian security officials in the presence of visiting British detectives.

The Russian media have quoted unnamed officials as saying that Russian police, due to visit Britain in the next few days, will focus on the theory that Kovtun and Mr. Lugovoi were engaged in smuggling nuclear materials and may have been trying to shop the illicit polonium to anti-Kremlin émigrés based in London. They suggest Russian detectives will seek interviews with Litvinenko's former patron, exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, and Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev, both of whom have been granted political asylum in Britain.

"It really looks like it might be some sort of a black-market thing," says Daniil Kobyakov, an expert with the Pir Center in Moscow, which specializes in nuclear issues. "It's hard to imagine that professional intelligence people would create this kind of weird spectacle, or even have used such an expensive and impractical weapon as polonium in the first place."

Other experts suggest a deeper conspiracy in which Kovtun and Lugovoi are being scapegoated by shadowy Russian secret-service factions. "Whoever is doing this has lots of money and resources," says Vladimir Pribylovsky, director of Panorama, an independent Moscow think tank. "Now it looks like they are killing the witnesses."

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