https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-...-berlin-killing-used-fake-identity-documents/
Russia appears to have engaged in some more wet work to take out a Chechen in Germany.
Russia appears to have engaged in some more wet work to take out a Chechen in Germany.
23 August 2019, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen living in Germany, was assassinated in downtown Berlin while having lunch on the way to a mosque for Friday prayer. Khangoshvili was assassinated with three bullets, two of them fired at close range at his head. The killer, who was hiding in the nearby bushes, rushed toward the victim on an electric bike and shot the victim — once in the shoulder and twice in the head — using a 9mm Glock 26 with an attached silencer.
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A joint investigation between Bellingcat, the German newspaper Der Spiegel, and The Insider (Russia), has established that the assassin travelled to Berlin via France under a validly issued, non-biometric Russian passport in the name of Vadim Andreevich Sokolov, born in August 1970. Despite the fact that he used a legitimate passport, we have determined that no such person exists in Russia’s sprawling, comprehensive national citizen database. In addition, no trace of such a person exists in a trove of hundreds of leaked residential databases, previously obtained and aggregated by Bellingcat. This discovery makes Russia’s claims that the killer is not connected to the Russian state implausible, as no person in Russia is in a position to obtain a valid Russian passport under a fake identity without the involvement of the state bureaucratic and security apparatus.