The Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London, has died in hospital. His final statement accused Russian President Vladimir Putin by name of ordering his murder.

In the statement, read out by his friend Alex Goldfarb outside University College Hospital, London, Mr Litvinenko said he had a “message to the person responsible for my present condition”.

“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price.

“You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.”

“The howl of protest from around the world will reverberate Mr Putin in your ears for the rest of your life,” the statement added.

The statement was dictated on 21 November, when Mr Litvinenko realised he could die.

So far there is no actual evidence of a forensic nature linking Russia to Litvinenko’s death and his death is listed by UK authorities as “unexplained.” But,

Mr Litvinenko had recently been investigating the murder of his friend, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another critic of the Putin government.

Russian dissident Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel and friend of Mr Litvinenko, maintained that the poisoning had been the work of the Russians.

The Russian security service had “sent a man with a poisonous pill to Britain”, put a pill into Mr Litvinenko’s tea and killed him, he told BBC News.

Intelligence analyst Glenmore Trenear Harvey said Mr Litvinenko had “made a lot of enemies” when he had been tasked with fighting corruption during his time with the Federal Security Service (FSB) - the KGB’s successor.

Remember: before the fall of the old Soviet state apparatus, Putin was head of the KGB, which morphed after the USSR dissolved into the FSB but was ruled by the same hands. So is Vladimir Putin “barbaric and ruthless” as Mr. Litvinenko accused? Well, consider:

Russia has begun deliveries of the Tor-M1 air defence rocket system to Iran, Russian news agencies quoted military industry sources as saying, in the latest sign of a Russian-US rift over Iran.

“Deliveries of the Tor-M1 have begun. The first systems have already been delivered to Tehran,” ITAR-TASS quoted an unnamed, high-ranking source as saying Friday. …

The Tor-M1 is a low to medium-altitude missile fired from a tracked vehicle against airplanes, helicopters and other airborne targets.

Expect the AA missiles to be deployed at Iran’s nuclear-weapon development sites right away. Barbaric? Ruthless? You decide.