Thread by @MFreyrie

So, apparently the recent murder of a Georgian national in #Berlin is directly correlated to the modest research I conducted for my thesis, so I thought it would be useful if I scribbled down some educated guesses one can make about this assassination.

First of all, German police has been very reluctant to share details beyond the name of victim and perpetrator, and the dynamics of the assassination itself. We know that the victim, a Georgian-Chechen, had been accused by Moscow of collaborating with Islamist insurgents.

However, Der Spiegel and Bellingcat revealed some interesting details. Based the entries of Russia's federal passport database, it's highly likely that the assassin was provided with a fake passport, a non-biometric version issued in very rare cases. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

The victim, Z. #Khangoshvili, had survived other two plots against his life back in Georgia, and was waiting a court ruling on his appeal against deportation from Germany. The perpetrator, on the other hand, is a phantom: his identity was likely fabricated, as reported above.

Full speculation mode on: a theory has been making rounds that he may be an inmate lifted from a Russian prison, based on his tattoos. The behaviour would be in line with the general strategic reasoning by the intel services we've witnessed in other hits across the world.

Using criminal assets for dirty work has a long history in the FSB/GRU. The choice whether to outsource the job depends on the relative probability of success of "amateurs", the gravity of being discovered, and the eventual reaction by the country in which the target resides.

The presence of a big criminal community in the host country can be a useful asset to these operations, as it provides a useful information-gathering network and is more likely to provoke a police investigation rather than counter-intelligence actions.

Criminals also tend to be less sophisticated (in this case, he tried to escape on a bike), provoking less outrage if discovered (remember Skripal and the OPCW involvement). If you can terrorize your enemies with a "simple" bullet, then why stir public opinion with polonium?

Which leads me to these hypotheticals:
a) whoever ordered the assassination doesn't expect a big blowback from the public or Berlin, but also doesn't want to provoke them with spectacular actions
b) endangered political refugees are not well-protected and can be reached easily

Once again, we still have little info on what actually happened, so all of this may be gratuitous. However, assassinations are indeed a part of EU-Russia relations which needs to be urgently addressed. /See @GresselGustav's excellent commentary
ecfr.eu/article/commen…)