A bus ticket found in the coat of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko indicates he was poisoned in a central London hotel where he met two associates, the Daily Mirror said yesterday.
Citing police sources, the newspaper said that the ticket was bought near Litvinenko's central London home on Nov. 1, the day he fell ill, three weeks before he died.
He used the bus to travel in to central London where his meetings that day took place.
According to unnamed police sources cited by the Mirror, the bus he boarded has been checked and was not contaminated by the radioactive substance polonium-210, large quantities of which were found in Litvinenko's urine.
As the hotel was the first known place he visited, this indicated that he was poisoned there, because high levels of polonium were detected there.
On Nov. 1, Litvinenko met Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun at the hotel. He also met Italian security specialist Mario Scaramella at a sushi bar that day.
"This ticket helps us prove Litvinenko's death was not a suicide or an accident," an unidentified senior source within the Metropolitan Police's Counter-terrorism Command told the newspaper.
"He entered central London from his home without a trace of polonium," the source said.
"If he had already received the dose, it would have shown up on his bus seat. But the bus tested negative," the source added.
Meanwhile, German police said on Sunday that Dmitri Kovtun was contaminated with polonium-210 at least four days before he met the former Russian spy on Nov. 1. German police said Kovtun had already been in contact with the radioactive substance.
The German inquiry focused on whether he was in illegal contact with radioactive materials rather than on the murder of Litvinenko itself.
At a press conference, a senior prosecutor said that one possible explanation was that while"packaging or transporting" the polonium before the meeting, Kovtun had been "sloppy" and accidentally touched it.
Police however added that the evidence did not necessarily mean that Kovtun had been involved in the plot to to poison Litvinenko.
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