MOSCOW - As Alexander Litvinenko lay dying at a London hospital, a fellow former KGB agent wrote angry letters from a Ural Mountains prison colony saying his warnings that a government hit squad had been hunting Litvinenko were ignored.
After a series of sensational accusations by Mikhail Trepashkin, authorities transferred him to a higher-security barracks. Trepashkin's lawyers say he has been placed in conditions that exacerbated his chronic asthma, threatening his life.
In letters released by his lawyers late last year, Trepashkin said he had long warned of a death squad formed by Russia's FSB security service to kill Litvinenko and other Kremlin critics.
"I'm feeling a great anger in my soul over Alexander V. Litvinenko's death," wrote Trepashkin, who was convicted of divulging state secrets. "Anger at the fact that the weak and disorganized human rights movement in Russia could neither prevent political murders nor provide protection to people persecuted by the authorities for political motives."
Russia's top prosecutor dismissed the letters as "stupidity" and refused to allow a team of Scotland Yard officials to talk to Trepashkin during a December trip to investigate Litvinenko's poisoning death.
Trepashkin's lawyer, Yelena Liptser, said it looked like an attempt by officials to hide the truth. "If they want an objective and thorough investigation, they must provide access to a person claiming that he has information related to the probe," she told The Associated Press.
On Tuesday, Britain requested the extradition of former KGB bodyguard Andrei Lugovoi, saying it had enough evidence to charge him in Litvinenko's death. Lugovoi met with Litvinenko at a London hotel the day his tea was poisoned with polonium-210, a radioactive substance. He has denied any involvement in Litvinenko's murder, and Russian authorities said his extradition was unlikely.
Several human rights organizations have appealed for Trepashkin's release or for improved medical treatment. In late March, the U.S.-based group Human Rights First warned Trepashkin "could die in custody."
Liptser said the prison where Trepashkin, 50, is held, near the industrial town of Nizhny Tagil, 750 miles east of Moscow, is next to a huge coke plant whose toxic emissions badly exacerbated his condition. Officials have rejected appeals that he be hospitalized or transferred elsewhere.
"He's having regular asthma attacks, and we fear that he may die of it one day," Liptser said.
Lyubov Kosik, another Trepashkin lawyer, said prison doctors told Trepashkin he needs no special medication, leaving him to seek a remedy "from a local drug store."
"He never loses his strength and keeps saying he must continue his fight," she said.
Trepashkin, who became a lawyer after quitting the FSB - an agency that succeeded the KGB - was arrested in October 2003 on charges of illegal possession of a gun, which he said was planted. He was arrested days before he was to have taken part in a trial related to the 1999 apartment building explosions that killed about 300 people in Moscow and two other cities.
The government blamed the explosions on Chechnya-based rebels, but Litvinenko and other Kremlin critics alleged they were staged by authorities as a pretext for launching the second Chechen war. Trepashkin was one of those who rejected the official version of the bombings.
Trepashkin said in his prison letters that FSB officers possessed poisons that could be applied to a car's steering wheel, door handles, telephone receivers and elsewhere - some of which wouldn't leave a trace in the victim's body. He said Litvinenko could be the most recent of a number of people allegedly murdered by FSB poisons.
Trepashkin wrote that FSB Col. Viktor Shebalin met with him in August 2002 and asked him to join a group targeting Boris Berezovsky, a self-exiled Russian tycoon living in London, and Litvinenko.
Shebalin could not be located for comment.
Trepashkin said he refused to cooperate with the team, whose task was to "mop up" Berezovsky, Litvinenko and their accomplices.
When Trepashkin was tried on charges of divulging official secrets, Shebalin was the main witness for the prosecution. He denied divulging state secrets.
"It would seem ridiculous if it weren't so sad," Liptser said of the charges.
Trepashkin wrote bitterly that his case had remained largely out of public eye: "Litvinenko and I weren't the last victims of persecution. You keep silent? Any of you could be next in the line."
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