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My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

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Hello and welcome to this witness history podcast from the BBC World Service

with me Rebecca Kespi and following the decision of the European Court of Human Rights

to find Russia responsible for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, we bring you a program

from our archives. It was a story that could have been lifted from the pages of a Cold War thriller. In November 2006, Alexander Litt Vignenko, a former colonel in the KGB, was fatally poisoned in London. In 2017, I spoke to his wife, Marina Litvinenko, about his strange and harrowing

death and why she's always believed Moscow was behind it.

Scotland Yard is investigating the suspected poisoning of a Russian dissident living in Britain.

On November the 1st, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko began to feel unwell. It was the sixth anniversary of

his arrival in London to seek political asylum.

Every 10 minutes he needed to vomit.

Sasha started to develop different symptoms,

diarrhea, stomach ache, from healthy men.

It was just like a absolutely ruined person.

He'd left Russia with his wife Marina and young son Anatoly,

after he became a whistleblower against corruption and criminality

at the very top of Russian politics. Marina says he immediately suspected he'd been poisoned.

Sasha from the very beginning, he just said,

...