someone who was washing dishes in the pine bar or in a hotel, cleaning crew, do we know, ultimately? five months after litvinenko s death, scotland yard issued an arrest warrant for lugovoi. kovtun s would come later. the two responded with a press conference in moscow stating their innocence. [ speaking russian ] russia refused to extradite them, so we traveled to moscow to find the men who are wanted in connection with litvinenko s murder. coming up, the stakes get even higher as we confront a top russian official when dateline continues. saturdays happen.
someone s tea cup and everyone s laughing at it? i mean, the state cannot be involved in that. litvinenko s friend paul joyal, who believes he was the target of a botched assassination, agrees that in some ways litvinenko s killers were indeed clumsy and careless. but he says that s because they were probably just pawns in a much bigger game. do you think that any of them knew what that substance was? do you think that they knew they were handling polonium? why wouldn t they have known what they were handling? because you don t want them to know. but they could have done a better job not spreading it all over the place if they knew. they also might say no, there s no way i m going to do that. i don t want to handle that radioactive material? i am not going to kill myself in the process. to get closer to the truth about who killed litvinenko, we had to talk to the suspects themselves, andrei lugovoi and dmitri kovtun. in kovtun s case, it wasn t easy.
just a mystery. unknown unknown assailants. turn the page, move on. it s the key of this murder. polonium 210 was discovered and now we know exactly sasha was killed by polonium 210. it s an almost perfect murder weapon. polonium has no smell, little taste, and without specialized equipment, it s undetectable. the amount that killed litvinenko, slipped into something he ate or drank, was no larger than a grain of salt. but that s still a thousand times the lethal dose. and that tiny bit of polonium would have been enormously expensive. $8 million to $12 million to be able to get the portion that went into him.
from his perspective, it does make sense. uh-huh. no, sure, everything is very strange. scaramella had been working for the italian government and sometimes used litvinenko as a source for investigations into the russian mob and spy rings. so he was giving you names of russian mafia members. yes, names, dates. who were connected to the intelligence service? exactly. something that was sure to upset both the mobsters and the fsb. scaramella told us that in october 2006, the month before litvinenko was poisoned, he began receiving frightening e-mails. the final message arrived on the very day of his last meeting with litvinenko. and what did that message say? look, there are people ready to kill you. the emails amounted to a hit list. the next name up alexander. alexander as in litvinenko.
but who could get hold of such an expensive and exotic weapon? and just how did they deliver the fatal dose? when detectives went step by step with litvinenko through the day he was poisoned, he named three potential suspects the two russians and the italian. the first one we found was the italian. the first one we met was the italian. so now in rome, we re on our way to see mario scaramella, who hopefully can shed some more light on who killed alexander litvinenko and why. scaramella has been a hard man to pin down. first, he wanted to meet us in naples, then new york, then london. he finally agreed on rome, and we re about to find out why he s been so skittish. [ speaking italian ] how to describe scaramella? he s a lawyer, an academic, a security analyst, and also someone litvinenko never completely trusted. scaramella, you ll remember, is the contact litvinenko met at the sushi bar on the day he was poisoned. litvinenko thought you poisoned him? yes. you didn t poison him