LONDON -- An Italian security expert who met with a former KGB agent the day the ex-spy fell fatally ill with radiation poisoning has also tested positive for the substance, British media reported Friday.

Britain's Health Protection Agency confirmed that one person has tested positive for the poison that killed Alexander Litvinenko, but declined to identify the person.

Three pathologists, wearing protective suits to guard against radiation, began an autopsy on Litvinenko's body Friday.

Sky Television and the British Broadcasting Corp. reported that the Italian, Mario Scaramella, tested positive for a significant amount of polonium-210, the rare radioactive isotope that was found in Litvinenko's body.

Scaramella met with Litvinenko at a sushi bar in London on Nov. 1 -- the day the former intelligence agent first reported the symptoms that ultimately led to his death at a central London hospital.

The Italian, who earlier this week said doctors had cleared him, has said he showed Litvinenko e-mails from a confidential source listing potential targets for assassination, including himself and Litvinenko.

In a letter released Friday by human rights activists, a former Russian security officer -- now jailed -- offered similar allegations, saying he had warned Litvinenko about a government-sponsored death squad that intended to kill him and other Kremlin opponents.

Litvinenko, a Kremlin critic who lived in Britain, died Nov. 23 at a London hospital. In a deathbed statement, he blamed President Vladimir Putin for his poisoning -- charges the Kremlin rejected as "sheer nonsense."

"Back in 2002, I warned Alexander Litvinenko that they set up a special team to kill him," the former security services officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, wrote in the letter dated Nov. 23 -- the day of Litvinenko's death.

The letter was released Friday by rights activists in Yekaterinburg, the center of the Ural Mountains province where he is serving his four-year sentence. Its authenticity could not immediately be confirmed.

A spokesman for Russia's Federal Security Service, the KGB successor agency known by its Russian acronym FSB, refused to comment on Trepashkin's claim.

Trepashkin was arrested in October 2003 and convicted on charges of divulging state secrets while investigating allegations of FSB involvement in a series of deadly apartment bombings that killed about 300 people in Moscow and two other cities in 1999. The government blamed the explosions on Chechnya-based rebels, but Litvinenko and other Kremlin critics alleged they were staged by authorities as a pretext for launching the current Chechen war.

The FSB, where both Trepashkin and Litvinenko worked, alleged that Trepashkin had been recruited by British agents to collect compromising materials on the explosions with the aim of discrediting the Russian security agency.

Trepashkin said in his letter that after his arrest authorities had put him in a cell contaminated with poisonous chemicals and threatened to kill him.

"Litvinenko and I aren't the last in this chain of victims of persecution," he wrote. "Maybe Litvinenko's death could make you believe in what he was saying."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday that Moscow was ready to answer concrete questions from Britain concerning Litvinenko's death, Russian news agencies reported.

"When the questions are formulated and sent through the existing channels, we will consider them thoroughly," Lavrov was quoted as saying in Jordan by the ITAR-Tass news agency. "There have been no such questions yet."

Traces of radiation have been found at a dozen sites in Britain and five jetliners were being investigated for possible contamination as authorities widened their investigation into Litvinenko's poisoning.

Doctors in Moscow have said they believed Yegor Gaidar, a former premier and head of a liberal opposition party, may also have been poisoned during a conference Nov. 24 in Ireland.

British Airways said Friday that one of its planes that has been parked at a Moscow airport would be flown back to London later in the day for a radiation check. Traces of radiation were found on it and two other aircraft that have traveled the Moscow-London route since Nov. 1, when Litvinenko is believed to have been poisoned.

In 1998, Litvinenko publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill the tycoon Boris Berezovsky and spent nine months in jail from 1999 on charges of abuse of office. He was later acquitted and in 2000 sought asylum in Britain.

Trepashkin's letter also mentioned official targeting of Berezovsky.

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