LONDON (AP) - A former Russian spy who was poisoned has been transferred to an intensive care unit after his condition slightly deteriorated, hospital officials said Monday. Former KGB and Federal Security Service Col. Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken Kremlin critic, was under armed guard at a London hospital after apparently being given the deadly poison thallium—a toxic metal found in rat poison.
Litvinenko "remains in a serious condition but last night there was a slight deterioration in his condition and he was transferred to intensive care as a precautionary measure," University College Hospital said.
Litvinenko, who had been looking into the killing of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, told reporters last week that he fell ill Nov. 1 following a meal at a sushi restaurant in London with a contact who claimed to have details about the murder.
In an interview with the Sunday Times before his condition worsened, Litvinenko described how he had lunch with an Italian contact who claimed to have had information on Politkovskaya's killing, which has not been solved.
British news outlets identified the contact as Mario Scaramella, an Italian academic who helped investigate KGB activity in Italy during the Cold War.
"They probably thought I would be dead from heart failure by the third day," Litvinenko was quoted as saying in the Sunday Times. "I do feel very bad. I've never felt like this before—like my life is hanging on the ropes."
Police said a specialist crime unit began an investigation on Friday into how Litvinenko may have been poisoned.
Glenn Edwards, operations manager at Itsu restaurant where the lunch took place, said detectives had arrived at the restaurant Saturday, asking for close circuit television footage.
Litvinenko left Russia for Britain six years ago. In a 2003 book, "The FSB Blows Up Russia," he accused his country's secret service agency of staging apartment-house bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people in Russia and sparked the second war in Chechnya.
Boris Berezovsky, the Russian dissident and tycoon who was at Litvinenko's bedside on Friday, told The Associated Press he suspects Russia's intelligence services of the poisoning.
Litvinenko joined the KGB in 1988 and rose to the rank of colonel in its successor, the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB. He began specializing in terrorism and organized crime in 1991, and was transferred to the FSB's most secretive department on criminal organizations in 1997.
He fled Russia and claimed asylum in Britain in November 2000, two years after publicly accusing his FSB superiors of ordering him to kill Berezovsky, at the time a powerful Kremlin insider. Berezovsky said Sunday that Litvinenko fell out with his superiors after he exposed corruption within FSB ranks.
Before he left Russia, Litvinenko was jailed for nine months awaiting trial on charges of abusing his office; he was acquitted.
