"I'm not sick, that's for sure," he told BBC radio earlier this week.

But health authorities on Friday confirmed that "significant" amounts of polonium 210 had been found in his body, and he was taken to hospital for what is likely to be weeks of tests, if not worse.

Scaramella met Litvinenko at a central London sushi bar on November 1. The Russian fell ill hours later and died on November 23 of what doctors say was contamination from polonium 210.

Scaramella has denied any involvement in the poisoning amid some reports casting suspicion on him and said the meeting was to discuss an alleged Russian secret services hit list on which both their names featured.

"The work we did for years was to underline the links among Russian mafia and some high level corrupted officers in the Russian government," Scaramella told the radio.

"I can only imagine that the people who he worked against and we worked together against maybe decided to attack him," he said.

Scaramella told last weekend's edition of the Mail on Sunday that in 2003 he made the jump from environmental to intelligence work when he was appointed as a consultant to an Italian parliamentary inquiry, the Mitrokhin commission.

Interviewed while back home in Naples, Scaramella said he met Litvinenko through his work on the commission set up to probe alleged links between former Soviet KGB intelligence and the leftist Italian militants the Red Brigades.

"My work involved a lot of Soviet issues -- the dumping of radioactive waste, which can be detected from space, and the loss of nuclear devices," he was quoted as telling the Mail on Sunday.

Scaramella, who the newspaper says is unmarried with two children, said the commission wanted outsiders to work as investigators even though he told them he was an expert on nuclear waste, not on security issues.

He said in 2003 he "looked at the operations of the KGB and eastern bloc countries on Italian soil," then in 2004 he led an investigation on the illegal dumping of waste by the mafia in an Italian lake, according to the newspaper.

It also said that in June last year, Italian police launched a probe into an alleged plot to smuggle uranium into the country after Scaramella tipped them off. Four people were arrested within a day.

Many details behind the man with dark hair, brown eyes and a round face are hard to confirm.

Scaramella said he began his career in 1995 in his native Naples as a lawyer who set up his own company specializing in environmental law.

Naples University -- where reports have said he is based -- cannot say whether he worked or still works there and he does not feature on a public list of academics.

In a 2004 interview with La Repubblica newspaper, he said he was a "security expert" trained in England, France and Belgium, was aged 36 and had two children.

He said he had held a post at San Jose University in the United States and had been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to go to Colombia to research alleged links between Russian spies and drug trafficking.

Scaramella is said to head up an organization called the Environmental Crime Prevention Programme (ECPP) but information about it is elusive.

Italy's Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema said this week that Scaramella has never been an Italian secret agent, even though he had tried twice to contact the heads of the domestic secret service "who asked him not to seek further contact."

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