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Radioactive spy
Islamic convert? 
Fears raised Litvinenko helped
al-Qaida with 'dirty bomb' plot

Reports that KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko converted to Islam before his mysterious poisoning with radioactive polonium 210 is raising suspicions that he may have been involved in a plot to smuggle the deadly substance to terrorist groups willing to pay millions even for a gram.

Scotland Yard detectives are now trying to discover if Litvinenko had any secret links with Islamic extremist terror groups, the London Sunday Express is reporting.

Their biggest fear, the paper reports, is that Litvinenko, who died of polonium-210 poisoning in a London hospital, may have been helping al-Qaida or other extremist groups get hold of radioactive material to be used in a devastating "dirty" atom bomb.

Britain's secret intelligence service MI6 had earlier learned that al-Qaida was prepared to pay $3 million a gram for polonium 210, G2 Bulletin reported last week.

Litvinenko's friend Mario Scaramella now says the late spy helped smuggle radioactive material from Russia to Switzerland in 2000. Litvinenko was also known to have sympathies with Chechen rebels, seeking to break away from Moscow and create an independent Muslim state.

Litvinenko's conversion to Islam was announced by his next-door neighbor, moderate Muslim and Chechen dissident Akhmed Zakayev, who revealed: "He was read to from the Koran the day before he died and told his wife that he wanted to be buried in accordance with Muslim tradition."

Litvinenko's body is still so "radiologically hot" that an autopsy cannot yet be conducted. It is stored in a lead-lined vault in a London morgue.

Polonium 210 has been identified in five separate locations around London.

One is the luxury Millennium Hotel, near the U.S. Embassy. Another is a building in Mayfair that houses the office of Boris Berezovsky, a close friend of Litvinenko, and now an avowed enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While the government has insisted there is no cause for panic, MI6 and Britain's internal security service, MI5, have jointly launched a top-priority hunt on how further quantities of Polonium 210 could be smuggled by al-Qaida.

The hunt began a week ago in Peshawar. The ancient Pakistan city hosts a joint MI6/CIA surveillance operation supported by America's National Security Agency satellite surveillance.

Using the latest cyber-technology, the intelligence officers in Peshawar picked up a short-burst transmission from somewhere in Peshawar's Old Town. It was in response to a call that appeared to have come from beyond the towering Khyber Pass, possibly from Afghanistan.

The call was automatically recorded on one of the computers in the offices the MI6/CIA team share.

Just as automatically, it was dispatched down the line through cyberspace to GCHQ, the British Government Headquarters in the Cotswold town of Cheltenham. Simultaneously it reached America's NSA at Fort Meade, Md.

The words from Peshawar were part of the trillions of words in 500 languages that the GCHQ/NSA super computers are programmed to listen to, shift, reject or retain so they can be analyzed by the thousands of experts both GCHQ and NSA employ.

By late last week, MI6 knew of al-Qaida's offer to purchase Polonium 210.

Spy probe goes international 
British investigators visit U.S., prepare to travel to Russia

 The investigation into the death of a poisoned ex-KGB agent was expanding outside Britain, the country's top law enforcement official said Sunday, as investigators visited the United States and prepared to travel to Russia.

A potential witness in the investigation into the death of former Russian agent and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko has been interviewed in the United States and a team was ready to leave London for Russia within days, a police official said.

 The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case, said British police hoped to question a number of people in Moscow _ including Andrei Lugovoi, another former spy who met Litvinenko on Nov. 1, the day the 43-year-old fell ill.

The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Lugovoi as saying he had also been contaminated with polonium-210. He denied that he and two business associates who accompanied him to the Nov. 1 meeting were involved in Litvinenko's death. He did not say whether he had fallen ill.

"We suspect that someone has been trying to frame us," the Times quoted Lugovoi as saying. "Someone passed this stuff onto us ... to point the finger at us and distract the police."

Repeated attempts to reach Lugovoi in Moscow through his business associate, Vyacheslav Sokolenko, have been unsuccessful.

Litvinenko reported feeling unwell on Nov. 1 and died three weeks later, his body withered, his hair fallen out and his organs ravaged. He blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for his death, a charge Putin has dismissed as "nonsense."

Results of Litvinenko's autopsy are expected next week and the ex- spy's funeral will take place in London. Due to the levels of radiation in his body, the coffin will be sealed.

Home Secretary John Reid said Sunday the inquiry would go wherever "the police take it."

"Over the next few days I think all of these things I think will widen out a little from the circle just being here in Britain," Reid told Britain's Sky News television.

British officers, who are being assisted by the FBI, have interviewed ex-KGB officer Yuri Shvets in Virginia, the police official said. Shvets claimed to have compiled a dossier on criminal charges made by Russian prosecutors against people connected to the Yukos oil company.

Former Yukos shareholder Leonid Nevzlin, a Russian exile living in Israel, told The Associated Press last week that Litvinenko had given him a document related to the charges. Nevzlin _ charged by Russian prosecutors with organizing killings, fraud and tax evasion _ claimed the inquiries may have provided a motive for the ex-spy's poisoning.