Russia says UK playing politics with Litvinenko case

By Christian Lowe

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian state prosecutors on Monday accused Britain of being more interested in playing politics than solving the case of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

They hit back at British claims that Moscow was blocking its efforts, saying the British investigation was flawed and had been too hasty in naming a Russian man as the chief suspect.

"I do not think our friends should criticise our justice system. I think their efforts would be better spent improving their own system," Alexander Zvyagintsev, Russia's deputy Prosecutor-General, told a news conference.

"Sometimes it seems to us that Britain is not so much interested in the supremacy of the law as it is in the ambitions of certain officials."

The killing of Litvinenko, a former Russian agent and critic of the Kremlin who died of radioactive poisoning in a London hospital last November, has brought relations between Britain and Moscow to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

British prosecutors want to try Russian Andrei Lugovoy for murder, but Moscow has refused to hand him over, citing a constitutional ban on the extradition of Russian citizens.

London earlier this month expelled four Russian diplomats in protest at Moscow's refusal to extradite Lugovoy. In a tit-for-tat response, Moscow threw out four British diplomats.

Britain's decision to expel the diplomats was "plainly groundless, inappropriate, unjustified and lies exclusively in a political framework", said Zvyagintsev. "We refused extradition on the basis of the law."