Salisbury Novichok poisoning: Two Russian nationals named as suspects

[AJWhite1970]

We are so used to International espionage and terrorist claims in Salisbury these days, this is the headline news item in the Journal today. The Prezzo incident is currently the 4th headline....

 

[Arthur]

Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

 

Bellingcat has been able to confirm the actual identity of one of the two officers. The suspect using the cover identity of “Ruslan Boshirov” is in fact Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a highly decorated GRU officer bestowed with Russia’s highest state award, Hero of the Russian Federation. Following Bellingcat’s own identification, multiple sources familiar with the person and/or the investigation have confirmed the suspect’s identity.

 

This finding eliminates any remaining doubt that the two suspects in the Novichok poisonings were in fact Russian officers operating on a clandestine government mission.

 

While civilians in Russia can generally own more than one passport, no civilian – or even an intelligence service officer on a personal trip – can cross the state border under a fake identity. The discovery also highlights the extent of the effort – and public diplomacy risk – Russia has taken to protect the identities of the officers. President Putin publicly vouched that “Boshirov” and “Petrov” are civilians. As it is established practice that the awards Hero of the Russian Federation are handed out by the Russian president personally, it is highly likely that Vladimir Putin would have been familiar with the identity of Colonel Chepiga, given that only a handful of officers receive this award each year.

[witch]

We are so used to International espionage and terrorist claims in Salisbury these days, this is the headline news item in the Journal today. The Prezzo incident is currently the 4th headline....

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]50285[/ATTACH]

 

That man is a complete idiot. He has changed his name to Arthur Pendragon and he pretends to be a pagan and a druid. My brother-in-law, who was definitely a pagan and a druid, couldnt stand the man as all he wants is publicity for himself!

[Arthur]

Skripal attack: Bellingcat names second Salisbury suspect

 

A second suspect in the Salisbury case has been identified as Alexander Mishkin, the BBC understands.

 

The Bellingcat investigative website says the man who travelled under the alias Alexander Petrov is a military doctor working for Russian intelligence.

 

Last month, Bellingcat named the first suspect as Anatoliy Chepiga, a claim rejected by Russia.

 

Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in March.

 

The British open-source website said it had identified the suspect using testimonies from people the suspect knew and a scanned copy of his passport.

 

It claims he was recruited by Russian intelligence in 2010.

 

More details about how it uncovered the identity will be revealed on Tuesday, the website says.

[Arthur]

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/02/21/the-search-for-denis-sergeev-photographing-a-ghost

 

The search for the identity of the third Skripal suspect “Fedotov” was markedly more difficult than that for the other two suspects, “Boshirov” and “Petrov”. The reason for this, on one side, was the fact that British authorities released no information about – and crucially, no photographs of – the third suspect. On the other side, after Bellingcat’s initial identifications of Col. Chepiga and Col. Mishkin, the Russian authorities apparently took unprecedented measures to purge any traces of this person’s existence. Ironically, Bellingcat was able to witness this clean-up operation in real time, as data on this person that was originally available in online databases at the start of the investigation (in October 2018), became incrementally purged over the subsequent few months, with the person completely vanishing from all state-run registers by early 2019.

 

The initial existence of a likely third suspect traveling under the name “Sergey Fedotov” was first reported by the Russian website Fontanka, whose reporters first noticed that a person with a passport number pattern similar to that of “Petrov” and “Boshirov” traveled on a different Aeroflot flight to London on the same day as the main two suspects.

 

Bellingcat then obtained the passenger records for the 2 March 2018 flights from Moscow to London that had been reviewed by Fontanka, and identified the person, whose passport number different by the two last digits from those of the main suspects previously identified by us as decorated GRU officers. Indeed, “Sergey Fedotov” had flown into London on a flight several hours before “Boshoriv” and “Petrov”, landing at Heathrow, while they would land at Gatwick airport later that same day.

 

https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1098597947036581888