Moscow, Russia
A Russian court has given a renegade secret agent a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence after a highly publicized trial in absentia. In 1998 Alexander Litvinenko accused his superiors at the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, of ordering him to kill tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who is now a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko, who has fled to London, recently wrote a book accusing the FSB of planting the bombs that blew up several Russian apartment buildings in 1999. Putin’s government blamed those bombings on Chechen rebels. Trials in absentia will become illegal in Russia when a new criminal code takes effect July 1, so the court rushed to deliver a verdict.
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