Twice now Andrei Lugovoi has told reporters to wait until after January 15th before trying to get a statment from him. The first mention was here, in a bizarre cameo quote by Lugovoi in regards to the two week holiday period in Russia around Christmas and New Years:

“Call me after the 15th,” Andrei Lugovoi, a businessman and former K.G.B. agent at the center of the investigation into the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London, said when reached on Friday and asked about the status of the case. “We expect nothing to happen until after the 15th.”

The second mention was today as we learned Lugovoi has been discharged from the hospital (which is confirmation he is the lesser poisoned between himself and Kovtun):

A Russian former KGB bodyguard at the center of a probe into the murder of ex-agent Alexander Litvinenko has left hospital where he was treated for suspected radiation poisoning, Interfax news agency said on Tuesday.

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“I am relaxing: call back in a couple of weeks,” he told Reuters by telephone when asked whether he had left hospital. He then cut the call short and did not take further calls.

I speculated a while back that Kovtun and Lugovoi in all likelihood entered into plea agreements with authorities in order to turn evidence on higher ups. This seems to be further confirmed by a recent statement by a lawyer for Lugovoi:

A lawyer to Andrei Lugovoi, one of the main witnesses in the former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Alexander Litvinenko poisoning case, insists that there are no grounds to day that Russian citizens may be involved as suspects.

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“I am deeply convinced that Russian citizens cannot be involved in this case as suspects,” Romashov told Itar-Tass on Monday.

Add into this the statements by Scotland Yard that the people who poisoned Alexander Litvinenko will not stand trial in the UK we do seem to see evidence of this case coming to a major milestone. If Litvinenko was poisoned in a smuggling accident everything being reported would make sense. There could have been three victims of a smuggling accident (Litvinenko, Lugovoi and Kovtun).

The ‘accident’ could have been a rigged event, something meant to expose the smuggling ring. If some criminal element was actually a fair weather participant in the smuggling operation, they could have done some major damage by tampering with the contaiment device and causing the material to escape while it was in the hands of a rival element of the operation. That way the rival is exposed with his hands in the cookie jar and the rival could step in and take over.

The idea this is a civil war between criminal elements of the exiled Russian community is not a new theory. But what is new is a clear time table being reported to certain people. It would seem to indicate something pivotal is coming and Lugovoi will be freer to speak about what he knows after that event. The fact he is being coordinated with and is relaxing really gives me the impression his plea agreement is working to his advantage. Now the only question is who else is involved in this. Seems we may know sooner rather than later.