Litvinenko, he said, was part of a wider plot to recruit Russian citizens as agents in an attempt to gather compromising material on President Putin and his family.
"The British didn't like it when he boasted about his ties with MI6," he said.
RESPONSE: British security and intelligence officials acknowledged yesterday they had debriefed Litvinenko.
That would not be surprising, they said, given he was a former officer with the FSB, the KGB's main successor.
CONCLUSION: Litvinenko may well have boasted that he worked for MI6, but being debriefed by British officials does not make him an active British spy.
He is known to have been on the payroll of Boris Berezovsky until a few months before his death.
CLAIM: MI6 killed Litvinenko.
According to Mr Lugovoi, Litvinenko grew increasingly disillusioned with MI6 in the months just before his death, feeling undervalued and underpaid.
He managed to escape from MI6 control, but MI6 then killed him or allowed others to kill him, Mr Lugovoi suggested.
"It's hard to get rid of the thought that Litvinenko was an agent who got out of the secret service's control and was eliminated," he said. "Even if it was not done by the secret service itself, it was done under its control or connivance."
Asked if there was evidence of their direct participation, Mr Lugovoi said: "There is." He did not elaborate.
RESPONSE: British officials roundly dismissed Mr Lugovoi's claims. The Crown Prosecution Service says there is sufficient evidence for Mr Lugovoi to stand trial for Litvinenko's murder.
CONCLUSION: Most observers believe this to be highly unlikely.
CLAIM: MI6 tried to recruit Mr Lugovoi.
Mr Lugovoi claims he first grew suspicious of British intelligence's interest in him when he and Litvinenko started to receive very large payments for their work guarding British investors.
He said that British agents invited him to London and even provided him with a special mobile phone.
Their aim was to discover what the FSB was up to "in the so-called English direction" and to gather evidence against Mr Putin.
"From bad to worse: Litvinenko gave me an edition of Rubashka [a novel by Russian writer Yevgeni Grishkovetz] and told me that now we have to use cipher like in spy movies and to encode a text using numbers of pages, paragraphs and lines.
"I do not regard myself a passionate supporter of President Putin, and I have my personal reasons for that, which many can guess about. But I was taught to defend the motherland, not to betray it."
RESPONSE: British security and intelligence sources insisted yesterday they had never approached Mr Lugovoi.
CONCLUSION: Mr Lugovoi's assertions cannot be corroborated. Officially, Britain's security and intelligence agencies do not comment on specific allegations.
However, Whitehall sources said Mr Lugovoi's allegations were immaterial to the key point at issue, namely the murder charge against him. They described Mr Lugovoi's claims as a "smokescreen".
CLAIM: Mr Berezovsky worked for MI6.
Mr Berezovsky handed the British secret documents from when he was head of Russia's security council in the 1990s. As a British spy, Mr Berezovsky was granted asylum and citizenship automatically, Mr Lugovoi said.
RESPONSE: British security and intelligence sources insisted they have always kept "well clear" of Mr Berezovsky.
Mr Berezovsky said: "The UK authorities know very well who their MI6 agents are in the UK and so they know that I am not one of them."
CONCLUSION: Friends of Mr Berezovsky say that he may have met senior MI6 officers before he fled Russia, and he appeared to be close to British diplomats in 1996, when his television station played a key role in making sure the Communists did not win a general election. There is no evidence that he has ever been recruited by MI6, however.
CLAIM: Mr Berezovsky was behind Litvinenko's death.
Mr Lugovoi alleges that Litvinenko boasted that he possessed highly compromising documents that could have jeopardized Mr Berezovsky's claim for asylum in the UK, at a time when Russia was pressing for his extradition.
At the time of his murder, Litvinenko was considering blackmailing his boss to the tune of several million dollars, Mr Lugovoi says.
RESPONSE: The CPS has already requested the extradition of Mr Lugovoi, who it believes should stand trial for Litvinenko's murder.
Mr Berezovsky said: "It is now clearer than ever that the Kremlin is behind the murder of Alexander Litvinenko."
CONCLUSION: The trail of polonium-210 which was left around London, both before and after Litvinenko was poisoned, offers strong circumstantial evidence against Mr Lugovoi.
The use of such a substance suggests that people with access to state-controlled nuclear plants were also involved.