In November 2019, the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) announced the broadening of its criminal investigation into the shoot-down of MH17 to encompass the role of individuals within Russia’s military and administrative hierarchy who enabled the tragedy. The JIT made public 23 telephone intercepts from the days before the shootdown, which appeared to prove the…
Previously in this series: In previous joint investigations with Der Spiegel and The Insider, Bellingcat identified the killer of a Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian-Chechen asylum seeker shot at point blank in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten last August, as Vadim Krasikov, a 54 year old Russian linked to at least two contract assassinations in Russia. Using metadata…
In our previous investigation of the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili on August 23, 2019 in Berlin, we identified the suspected assassin — who traveled under the fake identity of Vadim Sokolov, 49 — as Vadim Krasikov, 54. We disclosed that Krasikov had a prior criminal history that involved at least two contract killings, once in…
On 27 October 2014, a man named Igor Nikoalevich Beregovoy arrived in Simferopol, Crimea, after boarding an Aeroflot flight in Krasnodar earlier that afternoon. Igor Nikolaevich was born on 30 December 1965, from the Crimean city of Simferopol. However, there is another man named Igor Nikolaevich born on 30 December 1965, and who was born…
One of the unanswered questions lingering after Bellingcat’s unmasking of the identities of suspects in the botched-up poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal, is how two (or, likely, more) undercover GRU officers were able to obtain visas to travel to the UK. Securing a visa to the UK – as to most of EU destinations…
