Thread by @christogrozev

Tomorrow, the Berlin district court will announce its verdict in the Kleiner Tiergarten murder case. The prosecution wants a conviction for Vadim Krasikov for life as a state-ordered assassination. The defense pleads that it was manslaughter, and there's no state involvement.

Manslaughter is an interesting point of view. I imagine the argument is that Krasikov ran the victim over with his bicycle and the gun fell from his pocket fired into the victim accidentally, before ricocheting into the nearby river.

It's very unlikely the judge will deem Krasikov to be innocent (or that he's named "Sokolov" - a non-existent persona created for this assassination). But it will be interesting if he will place the blame on the Kremlin, as the prosecution seeks to prove.

Dozens of data-points show that the killing was state-sponsored, and was organized by the FSB via its proxy - the Vympel group of "former" FSB spetznaz officers, as presented in a series of investigations made jointly by @bellingcat, @derspiegel and @the_ins_ru.

(data points including the complete fake identity given to the killer, along with tax number etc, the issuance of fake identities to his family after his arrest, his phone calls to FSB officers and his presence at scure FSB compounds in the weeks before his trip to Berlin)

Tomorrow's court decision will also be important milestone as the judge will have to decide if data gathered & analyzed by investigative journalists - which made a large part of the prosecution's case - rises to the level of forensic evidence that the court needs for a verdict.

Here's one of our investigations published last year - a good refresher before tomorrow's court verdict bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Here's one of the most thorough reports on what took place in the last few days at the Berlin courtroom: from @tavisupleba tagesschau.de/inland/tiergar…

According to do the German prosecutors, @bellingcat did the job of the Russian State, which refused to comply with international obligations to cooperate in cross border investigations.