why do we have to go into some kind of a bar and put it in someone s tea cup and everyone s laughing at it? i mean, the state cannot be involved in that. reporter: 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? reporter: why wouldn t they have known what they were handling? because you don t want them to know. reporter: 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. reporter: i don t want to handle that radioactive material? i am not going to kill myself in the process. reporter: to get closer to the truth about who killed litvinenko, we had to talk to t
originally called a suicide, last year a judge said he couldn t rule out murder.ul the way he killed himself reporter: he hanged himself with a scarf. with a scarf, in the bathroom, and the fact that his bodyguard was not there, it lfsc raises questions. reporter: in february, 2015,5 another putin opponent, boris ti nemtsov, was gunned down in the shadow of the kremlin. several suspects have been arrested, and the office of the president has denied involvement. the victim was about to lead a major rally against putin. it went on without him. people shouldn t be killed because theyt happen to disagr with the government.
to tell him about the hit list, to warn him. but, he says, litvinenko didn t buy it. he said, mario, don t care about that. reporter: he says it s bs. i think it s just a provocation, but please check what s happening. reporter: but after what happened to litvinenko, scaramella says he takes the hit list seriously. are you frightened for your life? well do you have another question? reporter: scotland yard questioned scaramella and eventually cleared him. why? because if you re looking for it, polonium is traceable. using specialized equipment, investigators were able to track it in people and in places. once polonium 210 had been identified, then across europe, like the slime from a slug all the way across, polonium was popping up everywhere. reporter: but not in scaramella.
drug-induced coma to save his life. he was unconscious for a month. local law enforcement initially assumed the shooting was a botched robbery, but elizabeth joyal believed otherwise. i didn t want to seem like this crazy conspiracy theory woman, but i knew that it was not a carjacking. there s just no way that it was just some random guy. it had to have been a planned attack. reporter: because nothing was stolen, and the assailants had clearly been lying in wait. which is why, when joyal came stumbling into the house with a bullet wound, he told his wife to call his business partner, a former russian spymaster. and warn him i was shot. reporter: so if you re warning your russian business partner that you ve been shot, you clearly didn t think this was a botched robbery,
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 that the uk special services and the uk court accuses russia and lugovoi that with a bag of polonium they came to london and were just throwing it around. reporter: it just doesn t make sense to a lot of people that russia didn t kill him. translator: for a hundred years, the russian special services have been using the kind of substances for killing people that you never will be able to recognize.