The idea Lugovoi was an assassin is an interesting one, except the fact he was not a Putin supporter, was an ally of Boris Berezovsky and was working business opportunities with Litvinenko for over a year. Other than that he is the perfect candidate for the Putin directed assassin:

He said their relationship became business-like after Litvinenko solicited his help as a mediator in talks with British military and security companies interested in expanding their businesses in Russia.

Lugovoi, who runs a security company in Russia, said: “He [Litvinenko] was only a mediator. He said he was not interested in anything, asking only for his cut if a contract was signed.”

…

Lugovoi said that Litvinenko had good contacts with two security companies in Britain, which, according to Western media reports, are Erinys International and RISC Management, and had been helping to facilitate talks since December 2005.

All joking aside, the two companies mentioned are the ones that showed up contaminated with Polonium-210. And it is possible Litvinenko was working the contraband side with these companies and independently trying to connect the companies upwith Lugovoi and Sokolenko (which would tie him back into the entire network). But that seems unlikely since Lugovoi shows up everytime Polonium 210 is smuggled into London.

What is interesting is the statement this business arrangement between Litvinenko and Lugovoi had been going on for a year. That is about the time I would expect to plan for either an assassination attempt that included smuggling Polonium-210 into London or just the smuggling itself. This is much more reasonable than the 3.5 weeks that Litvinenko comrade Yuri Shvets proposed in his rogue Kremlin/Businessman bent on revenge for losing out on a business deal.

What is also really important is the fact Litvinenko was being starved out by Berezovsky, the man supposedly in Litvinenko’s debt for saving him from an earlier assassination attempt:

He added that Litvinenko had serious financial problems and badly needed money, as his allowances had been reduced three-fold over the summer.

“He even named the figure, which was 1,500 pounds sterling [about $3,000],” Lugovoi said. “This is London, where even a handyman gets 2,000. I can say definitely the money issue interested him greatly and determined his actions.”

Why would Berezovsky, who claimed Litvinenko saved his life, push his old friend into financial difficulties? Well one reason would be to force Litvinenko into doing something he may not have wanted to do. Berezovsky is clearly a force to be reckoned with (you don’t get that much power and wealth otherwise). And maybe that was why Litvinenko was involved in the Polonium mess – he had no choice. He clearly was working as go between for Lugovoi and someone, probably Berezovsky. He met Lugovoi 13 times over the year. And we know the last three times included shipments of Polonium -210. And we can deduce from Lugovoi this business arrangement was nearing its completion

“I was going to pay Litvinenko and say ‘good-bye’,” Lugovoi said.

Was the Arsenal-CSKA game a celebration event tied to the last activity for Litvinenko and Lugovoi? Was Berezovsky the one who was finally blackmailed by Litvinenko to make sure his family was taken care of in return for the deathbed claims against Putin? It could be totally innocent business arrangements – except the Polonium 210 trails that criss-cross London tying the UK security firms to two Russians contaminated by Polonium, and a trail that still leads back to Berezovsky’s offices.

Update: More hints on the mechanism seen in the contamination trail in this report on someone who met with Litvinenko two days prior to the massive trail that showed up from meetings on Nov 1, 2006 and the testing that was done to determine he was clean of Polonium:

The leader of the Pora youth movement, Andrei Sidelnikov, said last week that he met with Litvinenko October 30, just two days before the former FSB agent’s hospitalization, at a cafe near the Oxford Circus underground station in London, adding that they spoke for nearly two hours.

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Sidelnikov said he was screened for polonium by experts from the Russian Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare, who asked him to come to the examination in the same clothes he wore the day of his meeting with Litvinenko.

“They [doctors] asked me to do this because they said that particles of polonium remain [on clothes] and cannot be washed away, and that if there were any particles, then sensors would definitely have given out a signal,” Sidelnikov said.

This may indicate the pattern the authorities are seeing in the Polonium-210 trail itself. The authorities are learning as they go and they are finding out how the forensics of Polonium works. What we are not seeing is the evidence collected at people’s homes and the stories around that evidence. For example Kovtun’s clothes, which appear to be the source for the Polonium trail in Germany. Much of the trail seems to be from particle trails off of clothes (as opposed to bodily fluids). The real question is what is the particulate size being discovered. Each particle tells a story about what was smuggled into London.

The particles seems to adhere at some point (possibly melting into the fabric due to the radiation) sufficiently to resist washing, but fall off at other times to leave a trail. It will be interesting to see who this trail was created.