Litvinenko widow wants jury to get police evidence

The widow of poisoned Russian emigre Alexander Litvinenko wants an inquest into his death to be held before a jury and examine the evidence gathered by British police, her lawyer said.

Marina Litvinenko filed a formal request last Friday to resume a London inquest that opened after her husband's death in November 2006 but adjourned while police conducted a murder investigation, in a case which badly hurt Anglo-Russian ties.

Given Russia's refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoy, who British prosecutors suspect of poisoning Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, she believes there will be no trial and wants police to disclose for the first time the evidence uncovered in their investigations.

"Clearly the inquest would be meaningless unless that happens," her lawyer Louise Christian told Reuters.

In a letter to the London coroner in charge of the inquest, Christian said it should resume as soon as possible and examine evidence that Marina Litvinenko believes shows the Russian state's involvement in the poisoning.

Russia strongly denies deathbed accusations by Litvinenko that he was murdered on the orders of President Vladimir Putin.

Litvinenko, a former officer in the KGB and FSB security services, had become an outspoken Kremlin critic and protege of exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, whom Moscow accuses of financial crimes and coup-plotting.

Anglo-Russian relations plunged into crisis last year when Moscow refused a British request to hand over Lugovoy, another former KGB man, who denies killing Litvinenko. Each side kicked out four of the other's diplomats in a Cold War-style exchange.

An inquest would attract huge publicity and could make it harder for the two sides to quietly draw a line under the affair, hampering prospects for a thaw in relations under Russia's president-elect Dmitry Medvedev.