Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy and fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin is fighting for his life in a London hospital after an apparent bid to kill him by poisoning, AFP news agency reports.

Alexander Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel in the Federal Security Service (FSB), fell ill after meeting at a London sushi bar a contact who purportedly had information on the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the Mail on Sunday said.

“Alexander has no doubt that he was poisoned at the instigation of the Russian government,” the Sunday Telegraph quoted as saying an unnamed close friend of Litvinenko, who was granted political asylum in Britain in 2001.

Litvinenko fled to Britain after blowing the whistle on an alleged FSB plot to assassinate Russian business oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who is also now living in Britain.

He reportedly fell out with Putin when the now president was head of the FSB in the late 1990s — Litvinenko was charged with tackling corruption but did not feel that Putin was doing enough about it.

He subsequently wrote a book called “The FSB Blows Up Russia”, claiming that the agency was linked to a series of apartment building bombings in 1999 which killed around 300 people. The bombings, blamed at the time on Chechens, were one of the reasons then Prime Minister Putin sent Russian troops back into Chechnya, a popular war that propelled him into the presidency in 2000.

Politkovskaya, a long-term thorn in the Kremlin’s side over the war in Chechnya, who was shot dead in her apartment building in October, prompting an international outcry, was reportedly a friend of Litvinenko.

Litvinenko fell ill shortly after his appointment with the mysterious contact on November 1, media reports said.

The Sunday Times said he had met an Italian called Mario at the sushi restaurant, who said he had important information on the death of Politkovskaya.

“I ordered lunch but he ate nothing,” the paper quoted Litvinenko as saying, without stating how or when it spoke to him.

“He appeared to be very nervous. He handed me a four-page document which he said he wanted me to read right away.

”It contained a list of names of people, including FSB officers, who were purported to be connected with the journalist’s murder.“

But Litvinenko added he was not in a position to accuse Mario of involvement in the poisoning, the paper said.

If Russia’s security services were behind the alleged poisoning, it would not be the first time that they have tried to silence critics on the streets of London.

In 1978, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was stabbed in the leg by a man with an umbrella while walking across London’s Waterloo Bridge.

The umbrella had fired a ricin pellet, and Markov died in hospital three days later.

KGB defectors including Oleg Gordievsky have since confirmed that the Soviet intelligence agency was behind the killing.

University College Hospital in London confirmed that Litvinenko was in a ”serious but stable“ condition, with the Mail on Sunday adding that he was under armed guard, had lost his hair, was struggling to speak and had only a 50 percent chance of survival.

He had kidney damage, was constantly vomiting and suffered an almost total loss of white blood cells, the Sunday Times added.

The paper said he had been poisoned with thallium and quoted a medical report which showed he had three times the maximum safe limit in his body, a potentially fatal dose.

Police confirmed that officers from the specialist crime directorate were investigating a ”suspicious poisoning“.

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