By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOVAssociated Press
MOSCOW - A former Russian security service officer said he warned a former KGB agent who was fatally poisoned in London about a government-sponsored death squad that intended to kill him and other Kremlin opponents.
In a letter released Friday, the former officer for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, said he refused to cooperate with the team, whose task was to kill Alexander Litvinenko and others. The FSB is the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.
Litvinenko, the former spy turned Kremlin critic who lived in Britain, died Nov. 23 at a London hospital, where doctors found traces of the rare radioactive element polonium-210 in his body. An autopsy was scheduled for Friday and doctors carrying out the examination planned safety precautions to protect themselves against radiation.
In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed President Vladimir Putin for his poisoning -- charges the Kremlin rejected as "sheer nonsense." "Back in 2002, I warned Alexander Litvinenko that they set up a special team to kill him," the former security services officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, wrote in the letter dated Nov. 23 _ the day of Litvinenko's death. The letter was released Friday by rights activists in Yekaterinburg, the center of the Ural Mountains province where he is serving his four-year sentence.
een poisoned.