BREAKING - Data freshly obtained by Ukrainian law enforcement and passed on to German investigators backs Bellingcat’s identification of the suspect in the Berlin Tiergarten Park assassination of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili bellingcat.com/news/2021/03/1…
Bellingcat, along with its investigative partners The Insider and Der Spiegel, had previously identified the person suspected in the August 2019 assassination as Vadim Krasikov, who traveled to Berlin under the name of Vadim Sokolov. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
The suspect, currently on trial in Berlin, has continued to insist his real identity is Vadim Sokolov, despite the prosecution stating that his real identity is Vadim Krasikov and that he travelled with fake documents. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Not only did we discover Vadim Krasikov was travelling under a fake identity, but we also discovered clear ties between him and the FSB, Russia's intelligence service. Our discovery led to German prosecutors charging the Russian state with the murder. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Тhe new data includes photographs from what appears to be a 2010 wedding album of Vadim Krasikov and his current wife. They also include a marriage certificate, showing the husband’s name as “Vadim Krasikov”. Other images allow for facial comparison with the suspect’s photo: 
The new photographs include an image of Krasikov sitting on a beach. Visible in the photograph is a large tattoo on his left shoulder. This tattoo is identical to the tattoo seen on the shoulder of “Vadim Sokolov”, from a police custody photograph dossier.center/berlin-murder/
A close-up comparison of the skin under the tattoo shows multiple overlapping skin artefacts, such as freckles, moles and scars, clearly indicating this is the same tattoo on the same person.
Importantly, the German indictment documents as well as a police file describing the arrested “Sokolov” refer to a second tattoo – of a snake – on his lower right arm. This is compatible with a snake tattoo partially visible on the lower right arm of Krasikov’s beach photo.
In addition to the new images, we have also discovered Krasikov’s wife and daughter have been moved to Simferopol, Crimea, following the assassination, with the involvement of Evgeny Eroshkin, a senior former FSB special operations officer.
Krasikov’s mobile phone was left at home when he went to Berlin, and evidence indicates it was used by his wife to communicate with a burner phone, which we suspected belonged to one of Krasikov’s supervisors, Evgeny Eroshkin.
On December 6th 2019 the metadata from the burner phone and Krasikov’s phone, used by his wife, both showed them travelling to Domodedovo airport. Krasikov’s phone was then never used again, and the burner was used in Simferopol, Crimea.
By analysing the flights between Domodedovo and Simferopol airports on that day, we were able to narrow down the potential flights to only one that matched the switch-off and switch-on times of the burner number. We then obtained the passenger manifest of this flight.
In the passenger list, we discovered, as we suspected, Evgeny Eroshkin – confirming our hypothesis that he was the owner of the burner number. We also identified two other passengers – appearing to be a woman and her daughter.
The woman and the child’s first names matched those of Krasikov’s wife and daughter, however the last name was different. Notably, the birth date of the woman was exactly one year older than that of Krasikov’s wife.
This is a pattern of false-identity creation that appears to be preferred by the FSB. We verified if a person with this name and birthdate exists in any Russian databases, and the result was negative.
This, together with the naming & birthdate pattern, plus the full match of the child’s birthdate with that of Krasikov’s child, corroborated our hypothesis that the Russian authorities had issued a new identity to Vadim Krasikov’s family, & had provided them with an FSB “handler”
Travel data for Mr. Eroshkin shows that he travelled from Moscow to Crimea at least once every month since that initial trip in December 2019 & used this burner phone almost exclusively for communication with a new burner number that we believe is used by Ms. Krasikova.
Many more details of our latest investigation and additional evidence of the FSB connection can be found on Bellingcat. bellingcat.com/news/2021/03/1…
Spiegel’s reporting on the story can be found here in German
spiegel.de/politik/deutsc…
spiegel.de/politik/deutsc…
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