"It was very offensive for the British government to say, so what if it's in your constitution? So I think that was a very foolish move as well." said Quentin Peel, FT international editor, in London during a video conference with RIA Novosti.
Any Russian suspect, he said, must be tried in Moscow, in line with Russian prosecutors' earlier proposals.
"Whoever is in charge should be put on trial in Moscow, in a totally public setting, with absolute publicity and all the evidence that can be produced," Peel said.
Moscow refused to extradite Russian national Andrei Lugovoi, accused by the U.K. of poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, a British citizen, by radioactive polonium-210 last year in London, because the Russian constitution does not permit the extradition of nationals. The row escalated into diplomatic expulsions and harsh rhetoric on both sides.
Peel said that the Litvinenko case was "the straw that broke the camel's back" in tipping the balance of misunderstanding in the Russia-U.K. relationship, bringing it to "not outright hostility but certainly some very stupid and counterproductive actions on both sides."
He dismissed Russia's complaints about the failure by Britain to extradite wanted Russians, first of all Boris Berezovsky, a fugitive billionaire accused of serious fraud, and Akhmed Zakayev, a former Chechen separatist leader charged with terrorism.
"The original legal requests for extraditing Berezovsky were actually very poorly drafted," Peel said. "As far as Mr. Zakayev is concerned, his defense in the British courts has always been that he is not a terrorist."
When asked whether he had trust in British justice, Peel said he as an ordinary citizen trusted the system "ninety-five percent."
"I think if I were a young black youth from a very poor area of London, I would feel differently. I would have worried that the courts are against me. But as a white citizen of this country, I have almost total trust that this is a good system that will give me a fair trial," he said. Most judges are white and middle class, he added, and "might instinctively act with the establishment but they would never take political instructions."
Peel denied any British interests were involved in the murder.
"This was a Russian-Russian event that just happened to take place in London," he said, adding that "Poor old Britain has been caught in the middle of this insane Russian-Russian squabble."
He said widespread Russian conviction that the U.K. was playing a nasty political game against Moscow was irrelevant, if only because London cannot play such games any more.
"We are not big players any longer, we have been completely screwed up by following the Americans into Iraq, we are getting into a terrible mess in Afghanistan, and if you think that we have some sort of a game going in the Caucasus or Central Asia, then you are living in the 19th century when we did the Great Game going, and of course that's where an awful lot of this wonderful old rivalry came from," Quentin Peel said.
