Bellingcat accuses Kremlin squad of new poison deaths

A Russian journalist and an activist were allegedly assassinated by the same Kremlin hit squad that later poisoned Alexei Navalny.

Timur Kuashev, a journalist critical of Vladimir Putin, was found dead in the city of Nalchik in 2014.

A Russian journalist and an activist whose bodies both showed ­injection marks when they died were assassinated by the same Kremlin hit squad that later poisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, it has been alleged.

The Bellingcat investigative website said that leaked travel data “strongly suggested” the ­involvement of the team of ­Federal Security Service (FSB) ­officers that nearly killed Mr ­Navalny with a dose of a novichok nerve agent in August.

Bellingcat earlier revealed that members of a clandestine FSB unit tracked Mr Navalny on more than 30 flights from 2017. Three of the officers followed him to the ­Siberian city of Tomsk, where their phone communications peaked on the day he was poisoned.

This month the squad was implicated by the website in the killing of Timur Kuashev, 26, a journalist, in the city of Nalchik, and Ruslan Magomedragimov, an activist in Dagestan. Further examination of the squad members’ flight records has hardened Bellingcat’s conclusions.

Kuashev’s body was found 16km from his home in Nalchik on August 1, 2014. It was lying on the road into a forest and his body and face were bruised.

The official cause of death was recorded as a heart attack but an independent coroner’s report found traces of an injection in his left armpit area. Kuashev had been openly critical of President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Partial airline data for 2014 shows that Konstantin Kudryavtsev, one of the FSB unit’s chemical weapons specialists, flew to Nalchik on July 13, and that Ivan Osipov, one of the three who later followed Mr Navalny to Tomsk, arrived on July 22.

Mr Osipov flew back to Moscow on August 1, hours after Kuashev’s body was discovered. Three other FSB operatives had arrived in the area in the days ­before, Bellingcat said. One of them was Alexei Alexandrov, ­another member of the Tomsk team in the Navalny poisoning.

Samples from spots of blood that had leaked on Kuashev’s shirt around the injection area were sent to Moscow for analysis but were examined by the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute, the unit that employs the alleged poison squad. No toxic substances were said to have been found and a criminal investigation into the death was soon closed.

The body of Magomedragimov, an activist who had supported the idea of an autonomous territory for ethnic Lezgins in Dagestan, was found in the city of Kaspiysk on March 24, 2015.

His relatives claimed that after receiving the corpse for burial, they noticed two dots resembling the traces of a syringe needle on his neck. Mr Osipov had arrived in nearby Makhachkala four days before the death, and left two days later. Mr Kudryavtsev had visited earlier in the month.

The Times