Bellingcat and its investigative partners have established that Russian politician, Vladimir Kara Murza, was followed by a specialist FSB team prior to his suspected poisonings in 2015 and 2017. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Members of the same FSB team, some of whom have medical and chemical weapons backgrounds, tailed Alexey Navalny before he was poisoned with a Novichok substance in August 2020.
Kara-Murza is a well-known Russian politician, film-maker and an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The circumstances around his suspected poisonings have long remained a mystery.
Travel details of FSB team members show they followed Kara-Murza on a campaign trip outside Moscow that ended less than 48 hours before his first poisoning incident in May 2015.
Kara-Murza recovered in the US before returning to Russia. Yet the same team began tailing him again just five months after he came back. He was poisoned for the second time in February 2017.
The number of coinciding trips – seven destinations with fourteen overlapping flights or journeys – renders a coincidental overlap between the travels of Kara-Murza and FSB squad members statistically implausible.
On at least one tailing operation, FSB squad members were accompanied by a senior official from the FSB’s 2nd Service, better known as the “Directorate for Protection of the Constitution and the Fight against Terorism”.
This officer, Roman Mezentsev, has previously traveled on joint bookings with high-level Kremlin officials including Vladislav Surkov, President Putin’s former advisor, who is long thought to have played a powerful role in Kremlin politics
Mezentsev is the highest ranking FSB officer whom we have identified on any tailing trip linked to an FSB poisoning operation.
Phone and flight records show Mezentsev frequently interacted and traveled with the chief of the directorate of the 2nd Service, Alexey Zhalo, and with other high-ranking FSB and government officials.
Mezentsev’s recent phone records also show that he communicated with scientist Col. Makshakov, the deputy chief of the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute and de facto chief of the FSB’s poisoning program.
Another potentially relevant finding in this report is that we have tracked the earliest incident of Kara-Murza being tailed to just a few days before the assassinaiton of Boris Nemtsov near the Kremlin.
This temporal overlap, paired with the similarity in risk profile of the two political activists, raises renewed questions about whether the Russian security services may have known or had a role in Nemtsov’s assassination
It must be noted, however, that the death of Nemtsov (he was murdered in a shooting) does not appear to follow the known methods of the poison squad.
Although, the FSB has been behind shooting assassinations before, such as the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in 2019 bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Kara-Murza, like Nemtsov, played a crucial role in the lobbying for and implementation of the Magnitsky Act which allows the US government to freeze assets of Rusisian and other government officials deemed to be human rights offenders
This legislation was sponsored in the US Congress by John McCain and has been a thorn in the side of the Russian leadership
Kara-Murza described to us in great detail the symptoms he felt upon becoming ill in 2015 and 2017. These included difficulty breathing, heavy perspiration, a starkly accelerated pulse and uncontrollable bouts of vomiting.
When he was poisoned for a second time in 2017, Kara-Murza’s wife secured samples of his blood and, on her return to the United States, handed them to US toxicology laboratories for analysis
The FBI also met Kara-Murza’s wife and collected blood samples which they promised to send on for toxicology tests.
They promised the results would be provided to Vladimir Kara-Murza, but he never received them
In February 2020, after three years of waiting, Vladimir Kara-Murza decided to take the US Justice Department to court under general Freedom of Information Act rules in order to obtain his own toxicology results
The FBI eventually shared with Kara-Murza a heavily redacted versions of its findings which concluded that Kara-Mirza was the subject of an intentional poisoning with an unknown biotoxin
275 pages featured redactions “pending consultation with other agencies”, while 10 further pages were blacked out “for national security reasons”
The reason for the extensive redactions is unknown. However, a clue to the answer may be contained in a heavily redacted intra-FBI email disclosed to Kara-Murza pursuant to his FOIA request.
The email from an unknown FBI official to another unknown colleague details the visit of unnamed officials to Washington in late January 2018, before raising a point that was “still a win and our initial course of action”
A possible indication as to who the redacted visitor, or visitors, to D.C. may have been can be found in the disclosure by the Washington Post that during the last week of January 2018, the three chiefs of Russia’s secret services – FSB, GRU and SVR– had visited the US Capitol
While there, the Post reported, they met with then CIA chief Mike Pompeo ostensibly to discuss issues posed by international terrorism washingtonpost.com/world/national…
A reference to a visit by Russian security officials would be logical in the context of the email’s caption – “Kara-Murza Case Status”.
However, what cannot be gleaned from the unredacted part of the email is what the reference to “still a win and our initial course of action.” is, as well as whether this visit played a role in the FBI’s decision to withhold the test results from Kara-Murza
Read the full article here: bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

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More from @bellingcat

10 Feb
Footage from a GoPro found at the scene of a riot in Portland last year appears to show far-right figure, Alan Swinney, preparing for violence at protests and discussing how to raise funds for weapons

New from @shane_burley1 @hungrybowtie and @Iwriteok

bellingcat.com/news/2021/02/1…
@shane_burley1 @hungrybowtie @IwriteOK Swinney gained widespread notoriety after he was pictured aiming a pistol at left-wing demonstrators at a protest event in Portland on August 22, last year.
@shane_burley1 @hungrybowtie @IwriteOK The 50-year-old is currently in jail awaiting trial on charges that include alleged assault, attempted assault and unlawful use of a weapon at that same August 22 protest. He denies all charges.
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9 Feb
On December 30th last year, a rocket attack targeted the Yemeni “unity cabinet” as they arrived at Aden Airport. Along with our partner @yemeniarchive, we examined the open source information from this attack.
bellingcat.com/news/mena/2021…
At about 1325 three missiles hit Aden airport.

The first hit the crowded terminal. The second hit the apron, and the third hit a low wall just in front of the terminal. All landed in the 100 meters between the terminal and the plane where the cabinet were.
The cabinet were very lucky: the second missile was a direct hit on the bay closest to the terminal.

Reporting on the ground, as well as the presence of a red carpet at this bay, indicates the plane was due to park there, but diverted due to crowds of well-wishers.
Read 9 tweets
8 Feb
In Dubai, social media stars pose with tigers, lions and cheetahs that can be tracked to a shady network involved in wildlife trade, writes @FoekePostma. bellingcat.com/news/mena/2021…
@FoekePostma Despite the UAE's ban on private ownership and trade of exotic and dangerous wildlife, some seem to end up as pets. Celebrities we could link to this network include a rapper, movie star, business magnate, TV-presenter, model, vlogger, footballer and even a fugitive criminal.
@FoekePostma By comparing these animals' unique patterns of stripes and (whisker) spots, we determined where they may have come from.
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3 Feb
On December 8, 2020, over $500,000 worth of bitcoin was donated to several alt-right figures and causes. Some extremists took this donation as evidence that the mysterious “Bitcoin Fairy” had returned.

But crypto experts @brenna__smith spoke to disagree bellingcat.com/news/2021/02/0…
@brenna__smith The Bitcoin Fairy is an element of far-right folklore dating back to an anonymous $60,000 bitcoin donation made to the Daily Caller after the now infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
@brenna__smith Yet like the mysterious creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, the true identity of the Bitcoin Fairy is shrouded in mystery.
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29 Jan
Our month-by-month analysis reveals the story of QAnon’s growth, showing how this notorious conspiracy theory has been able to evolve its narratives and adapt to contradictions — potentially allowing it to live on. bellingcat.com/news/americas/…
Bellingcat researchers analysed a dataset containing 4,952 so-called “Q drops”, the cryptic messages that are at the heart of the conspiracy theory, from October 2017 to October 2020.
Researchers then split the data into subsets of one to three month intervals and ran a clustering algorithm to group sentences of a similar sentiment (evaluated using the Universal Sentence Encoder). This allowed us to summarise major topics in Q drops for each time period.
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27 Jan
Thanks to our crowdsourced effort in finding new research leads from the travel itineraries of the FSB team that poisoned Navalny, we found three new apparent poison victims:
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
The first of the victims is Timur Kuashev, a 26-year-old journalist from Nalchik, in the North Caucasus. Kuashev blogged about local politics on Livejournal and was frequently faced with death threats for his work. In particular, he covered a high-profile criminal case from 2005.
Kuashev died in July 2014 after being abducted while walking to the theater. His body was found in a forest over a dozen kilometers from his home the next day.
Read 17 tweets

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