Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB spy struggling for life after being poisoned with thallium, had earlier accused Putin of being a pedophile.

Alexander Litvinenko wrote a sensational and unsubstantiated article earlier this year accusing Putin of having had sex with underage boys.

The bizarre story appeared on a website linked to the president’s foes in the breakaway region of Chechnya.

A cached copy of his story in Enlish can be found here.

After graduating from the Andropov Institute, which prepares officers for the KGB intelligence service, Putin was not accepted into the foreign intelligence. Instead, he was sent to a junior position in KGB Leningrad Directorate. This was a very unusual twist for a career of an Andropov Institute's graduate with fluent German. Why did that happen with Putin?

Because, shortly before his graduation, his bosses learned that Putin was a pedophile. So say some people who knew Putin as a student at the Institute.The Institute officials feared to report this to their own superiors, which would cause an unpleasant investigation. They decided it was easier just to avoid sending Putin abroad under some pretext. Such a solution is not unusual for the secret services.

Many years later, when Putin became the FSB director and was preparing for presidency, he began to seek and destroy any compromising materials collected against him by the secret services over earlier years. It was not difficult, provided he himself was the FSB director. Among other things, Putin found videotapes in the FSB Internal Security Directorate, which showed him making sex with some underage boys.