Poison suspect honored by Putin in 2014, according to the UK group
Poison suspect honored by Putin in 2014, according to the UK group
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One of the two suspects in the poisoning of a RussiaA former spy in England is a doctor in Russian military intelligence who was honored as a Hero of the Russian Federation by President Vladimir Putin in 2014, a group of British researchers said on Tuesday.
British police said two GRU agents traveling under aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Borishov used a Soviet-made nerve agent to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury in March.
The research organization Bellingcat said it had used documents and other investigations to identify Petrov as Dr. Alexander Mishkin, a member of the Russian intelligence agency GRU. Last month, said the true identity of Borishov is GRU Col. Anatoly Chepiga.
The British authorities do not dispute the identifications. Moscow, which denies having participated in the poisoning, declined to comment.
Bellingcat is a team of volunteer digital detectives who scour social networks and open source registries to investigate crimes. In the past, the group has focused on the demolition of a Malaysian passenger plane over Ukraine and chemical attacks in Syria.
The group said it identified Mishkin through passport information, resident databases, car registration records and phone records, as well as personal testimonies from people who know him.
Mishkin was born in 1979, grew up in the remote village of the Loyga swamps in northern Russia and studied medicine at the elite Military Academy of Medicine in St. Petersburg, according to the group.
Two alumni of the academy confirmed that Mishkin was the man British authorities identified as Alexander Petrov, Bellingcat said. Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins said a former student told the group that his classmates had "told them not to talk to anyone about their identity."
Seven residents of Loyga visited by the Insider, the Russian-Russian organization of Bellingcat, also identified Mishkin, the group said.
"They confirmed that their homeboy Alexander Mishkin was the person who went to military school and then became a famous military doctor and received the Hero Award of the Russian Federation personally from President Putin," said Bellingcat researcher Christo Grozev. , during a press conference. in the British parliament.
Traveling under his false name Petrov, Mishkin traveled to Ukraine and other former Soviet states between 2011 and 2013, Bellingcat said.
In 2014, he actively participated in military operations in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists lead a violent separatist movement. The same year, he was granted the highest honor of Russia.
Grozev said the villagers told that Mishkin's grandmother had a photograph "that has been seen by everyone in the village, of Putin shaking hands with Mishkin and giving him the prize."
Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Kremlin will not discuss the investigative reports and media articles about Skripal's poisoning. He reiterated on Tuesday the government's claim that Britain had hampered Russia's requests to share details of the investigation.
Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer, became a double agent for Britain, and his visiting daughter spent weeks in critical condition after Salisbury's attack. In June, two residents of the area who apparently came across a discarded jar containing the poison became ill; one of them died
Britain claims that the poisoning was authorized at a high level of the Russian state, a claim that Moscow denies. The poisoning of the Skripals ignited a diplomatic confrontation in which hundreds of envoys were expelled by both Russia and Western nations.
Last month, the two suspects appeared on Russian television and claimed that they had visited Salisbury as tourists to see the famous cathedral in the city, only to be frustrated by the ice and snow.
Higgins noted that Mishkin's home village is snowy for much of the year.
"Therefore, his claim that he could not walk through the hail in Salisbury to get to the cathedral seems pretty ridiculous at the moment," he said.
The attack on the Skripals has focused worldwide attention on the GRU, an intelligence unit that, according to Western officials, is linked to hacking and other secret operations around the world.
British, Dutch and US officials accused the GRU of trying to hack computers from international agencies, devising a devastating cyber attack in 2017 in Ukraine and being behind stolen emails that ruined the 2016 US presidential election. UU
Last week, authorities in the Netherlands claimed that the GRU had tried and failed to hack into the world's chemical weapons control body, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
The US Department of Justice also indicted seven GRU officers in an alleged international piracy attack that affected more than 250 athletes, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear power company, a Swiss chemical laboratory and the federal watchdog. chemical weapons.
Conservative lawmaker Bob Seely, a member of the British Parliament's foreign affairs committee, said that despite the failed murder of Skripal and the failed Dutch hack, the GRU was a formidable organization, used by Moscow as "the Kremlin's single window for the global subversion ".
"One should not simply judge the GRU for its failures, because they have also had many successes," Seely said. "I think the last two operations have failed, but maybe it's due to excess capacity or excessive ambition on their part."
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Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this story.
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SOURCE LINK ERESVIRAL.COM https://www.beviral.online
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