Having attended yesterday's hearing, I can perhaps clarify this.  All that Counsel to the inquest was saying was that, in the materials submitted by the British government, there is no evidence supporting the claim that Scaramella murdered Litvinenko.  This is, obviously, only one source of evidence.

In fact, the Coroner, Sir Robert Owen, indicated that, for the moment at least, he was not planning to rule any of the various suggestions put forward about how Litvinenko died outside the scope of the inquest.

In fact, our contention -- as argued in the following diary -- is emphatically not that Scaramella is likely to have murdered Litvinenko.  What we think is that the incrimination of his Italian colleague by Litvinenko was as much of a frame-up as a range of claims the two had earlier disseminated together.

The interest of his claim as evidence lies not in any likelihood that it is true, quite precisely in the fact that it is almost certainly false.  In criminal investigations, the lies people tell, and the 'smokescreens' they put up, are often of crucial evidential value.  We believe this is likely to be true in this case.