The forensic evidence suggests that either Lugovoi or Kovtun slipped it into Litvinenko’s cup of tea or water. He examines the role of the police, the courts, and the public enquiry that damned Putin and his cronies so comprehensively. Goldfarb’s account, written within months of the murder, is intelligent, contextually rich and insightful. The contrast between the banal interior of court 73 in London’s Royal Courts of Justice, and the shocking evidence we heard, was bewildering. But in the course of a few turbulent weeks in 1998 he was transformed from a Putin ultra-loyalist to an acrimonious, diehard foe.

Litvinenko's story is of course central but he was far from being a lone victim of state sponsored murder. The names of Boris Berezovsky and a mysterious Italian wheeler-dealer, Mario Scaramella, will figure prominently, together with those Russians already named, and there is at times some conflict between the various versions of events. The imam intoned a Muslim prayer and Zakayev made the ritual motion of washing his face with both hands. Luke Harding's book is an interesting and well sourced description of the events leading up to Alexander Litvinenko's murder from Polonium and the subsequent investigation by the British Metropolitan Police.Martin Sixsmith draws on his long experience as the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, and contact with key London-based Russians, to dissect Alexander Litvinenko’s murder. Alexander Litvinenko solved the crime of his murder as he was dying from poisoning and it took the British government another 10 years to confirm it. In 2001, the documentary film Assassination of Russia [33] was made on the basis of the book by French producers Jean-Charles Deniau and Charles Gazelle. In one corner of the ground, less garishly clad and very much quieter, a small throng of visiting Russian supporters struggled to make their voices heard. This book adds to the growing body of work that show Russia is a state that comfortably sponsors murder.

Some of the discrepancies may be the result of deliberate misinformation by some of the parties involved, and resolving them is crucial for the establishment of guilt and innocence in the crime that was committed.I read his moving statement and was impressed at his personal bravery and stoical response to events. It seems plausible, therefore, that Litvinenko’s interest in talking to the two men arose from his own activities providing information about market conditions in Russia – and about specific Russian companies – to Western firms. That conclusion, coming nearly 10 years after the murder, seems like a good occasion for the publication of a book that sums up not only what we know about the crime but also how we came to know it.

What is clear is that as a result of their telephone conversation the three men agreed to meet later that day. Unfortunately, the later chapters of the book are almost unreadable as evidence of killing and torture is just piled high, paragraph after paragraph, without a clear form or structure. Luke Harding served as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, and ran into enough trouble there to provide material for his 2011 book, The Mafia State. All the same, the British government’s response was to seek to preserve relations with Putin, and to avoid any public accounting of what had occurred.

The detailed description of Litvinenko’s decline and resulting was tough to read, yet handled in a very respectful way. It came to me that all the times I had met Berezovsky it was always inside, away from the light – under the fluorescent strips of his claustrophobic Down Street office or at the shielded corner table of the Al Hamra restaurant with his bodyguards surrounding us, watching all the doors at once. Did the planners know that polomium 210, while hard to detect in a body, leaves a larger external trail, one that could possibly put thousands at risk? According to Oleg Gordievsky, "For clues as to who wanted Alexander Litvinenko dead, you need look no farther than his book Blowing Up Russia" [28] Sunday Times described the book as "A vivid condemnation of the Putin regime".