off the charts. paul joyal wonders how many people were unwittingly exposed. do we know, ultimately, what the final cost of this use of polonium is? someone who was washing dishes in the pine bar or in a hotel, cleaning crew, do we know, ultimately? reporter: 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 ] reporter: 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. e insurance with geico!
alexander litvinenko, the former russian agent, the man friends called sasha, died without knowing what killed him. the results from a battery of tests came in too late. but they did come in. it turned out he was killed by something far more lethal than common rat poison. it s polonium. reporter: polonium 210 to be exact, a rare and deadly radioactive isotope. the news shocked the world, even though most people weren t exactly sure what polonium was. but paul joyal knew what it was and what it could do. that his friend effectively burned to death from radioactivity. it s a horrible death. it s a gruesome death. he lived longer than he than any man normally would under those circumstances. and he lived just long enough, within 12 hours long enough, for them to finally determine that it was polonium versus something else.
detectives don t believe lugovoi s denials. in fact, they think he tried to kill litvinenko more than once. that s because they found polonium on the table in a conference room where he and litvinenko had met two weeks before the pine bar encounter. was anything spilled on the table? translator: richard, you are asking questions. i remember some things. i don t remember other things. i cannot answer these questions because these can be used against me in the court, which is done frequently. reporter: as for his last meeting with litvinenko at the pine bar, lugovoi says there s no way he brought polonium on that trip because his wife and children were with him. translator: a person s weakest spot is his family. and i m a rational man. even if i had taken part in an operation, even if i had known what was in the container, would i take my family along? i m a rational man.
leadership. he believed he didn t do anything wrong. he was a good officer. reporter: and he didn t think it would get him in trouble? this wasn t just symbolism. in march 2006, eight months before litvinenko s murder, the russian parliament passed a law authorizing the liquidation of enemies of the state anywhere in the world. you don t pass that just for the sake of passing it. you have to have somebody in mind. reporter: seven months after the law was passed, someone was liquidated. a prominent russian journalist, shot in the head outside her moscow apartment. she was a friend of litvinenko. three weeks later, litvinenko himself was poisoned with polonium 210. duma leader zhirinovsky certainly didn t shed any tears when that happened but laughs off the notion that the russian state was connected in any way. for one simple reason. he thinks russian agents would have done a better job. translator: i m surprised
reporter: why, if he had died 12 hours earlier, would it have made any difference? because they wouldn t have found out. they would have marked the death certificate as death unknown. he would have been put in the ground, and it would have been 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. reporter: it s an almost perfect murder weapon. polonium has no smell, little taste, and without specialized equipment, it s undetectable. if you not looking particularly for polonium, you not able to discover it. do you know, it will be everywhere, but you don t know this. reporter: 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