Europe News

German police on Litvinenko case in reported rush to trace phone

Dec 14, 2006, 0:22 GMT

Berlin - German police trying to crack the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning case raced to Berlin this week in the faint hope of catching mysterious Russian businessman Dmitry Kovtun, a Berlin newspaper was to report Thursday. Police dismissed the account in the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper as speculation and said there had never been any evidence that Kovtun was in Berlin. Quoting security sources, the paper said police surveillance detected a phone call by Kovtun Monday night to his former mother-in- law near the city of Hamburg. Kovtun spent five days in Hamburg before meeting with Litvinenko on November 1. Although Kovtun is reported to be in a Moscow hospital, technical data suggested the mobile phone call was coming from an eastern inner-city section of the German capital Berlin, the paper claimed. Hamburg police raced to Berlin to check out the location, making the journey in just 90 minutes. The newspaper did not say what they found, nor how they travelled, but the fastest link is a bullet train that takes just over 90 minutes. The newspaper said crack Berlin police were not deployed because they lacked radiation protection suits. There was concern that Kovtun might be contaminated with polonium-210, the poison believed to have killed Russian ex-agent Litvinenko in London last month. © 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

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German police on Litvinenko case in reported rush to trace phone

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