Moscow/London, 8 July: The death of a former FSB officer, Aleksandr Litvinenko, who was poisoned by polonium in London in 2006, has become the centre of public attention again in Russia and Britain. (Passage omitted: Details of a BBC report on the Litvinenko case, as well as comments by Russian officials, are given; see previous reports.)

Meanwhile, Nikita Belykh, the chairman of the federal political council of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) (opposition party), said he had no grounds for judging whether the Russian side was guilty or not in the Litvinenko poisoning case.

"One cannot rule out anything now. But, in any case, you need very serious grounds to make such statements; and it would be reasonable if statements like that could be supported by something serious, even on the background of that mutual hysteria in relations between Britain and Russia," Belykh told Interfax on Tuesday (8 July).

Sergey Mitrokhin, the leader of the (opposition) Yabloko party, expressed a similar point of view.

"I cannot, I have no grounds to either agree with or deny these accusations," Mitrokhin told Interfax.

In his opinion, "the most important thing here is to arrange a full-scale investigation based on cooperation, and everything should be transparent".

"And, in my view, Russia should be no less interested in establishing the truth and in making it public, at least so that not to give grounds for accusations of committing such sins," Mitrokhin said.

Aleksey Malashenko, a member of the research council of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, believes the position of the Russian side regarding the Litvinenko case is a dead-end one.

"We all know that this (Litvinenko's murder) was carried out by the special services - this is an open secret. On the other hand, (the special services) cannot admit it," Malashenko told Interfax on Tuesday.

In his opinion, if the Russian side admits this fact, this "would destroy a part of Russia's foreign policy system. They will then have to explain other things as well, for example, (journalist) Anna Politkovskaya's case," Malashenko said.

"Generally speaking, there are certain ritual things: in this case they will be accusing us and we will be saying no," Malashenko said.

Commenting on the fact that the press has been paying a lot of attention to Litvinenko's murder case again recently, Malashenko said: "Media should treat the skirmish between Britain and Russia regarding this case as some kind of theatre where everyone plays his part".