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Watson: “Three days later [Lugovoy] flew from Moscow to London; Polonium was found on the British Airways flight. And Kovtun flew from Moscow to Hamburg on 01 November.”

Watson is confused here; on the morning of 01 November Kovtun flew from Hamburg to London.

“Again Polonium was found in the city, by German police.

“This was the day when they met Litvinenko, round the corner at the Millennium Hotel, in the heart of London’s Mayfair. On this day he received the fatal dose in his tea [Watson’s assumes]. An intelligence source told me that when they mapped Lugovoy and Kovtun’s movements against the exact places where the contamination was, there was a precise match. In May 2007, the then Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald recommended prosecution for murder. It was a bold step.”

Lord Ken Macdonald: “This was not some random killing. This was a killing with a very clear purpose and a killing with some state involvement.”

Watson: “So was the Russian state was involved? The inquiry heard strong scientific evidence that it was.

Not only was this evidence found to be fundamentally flawed, but Yasser Arafat is believed to have been killed by the same substance (see below) - and no one accuses Russia of complicity in that.

“Professor Norman Dombey is a physicist who gave evidence to the inquiry. The secret city of Sarov is the only place where the Polonium could have been produced, he says, in a military nuclear reactor.”

Prof Norman Dombey: “There’s no other reasonable way of making it.”

Watson: “That implies some degree of state control?”

Prof Dombey: “Absolutely. Everything about Polonium-210 is regulated by the state. Its transportation is regulated by the state and its use is regulated by the state.”

It should be noted however that Polonium-210 is commercially available, the United States being the most important buyer of Russian-produced stocks. The claims Prof Dombey makes here match closely those of Alexander Goldfarb in the book he wrote with Marina Litvinenko, ‘Death of a Dissident’, published in 2007. However, after listening to detailed evidence from a number of other scientists as well as Professor Dombey, Sir Robert Owen formally dispenses with the idea that the Polonium-210 which killed Litvinenko was susceptible to being traced to a particular Russian source, within certain dates.

“In summary, the claims made about the ‘fingerprint’ theory in the passage from Death of a Dissident that I have quoted above are not supported by the expert scientific evidence that I have heard.”(9.72)