UK's investigative website Bellingcat said Thursday it had identified a third man it suspects of a role in last year's poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th February, 2019) UK's investigative website Bellingcat said Thursday it had identified a third man it suspects of a role in last year's poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.
Denis Sergeev, 45, is a high-ranking officer of Russia's military intelligence agency GRU and operates under the cover identity of "Sergey Fedotov," the website claimed.
It published a blurry photo of an unknown it says is the elite and well-traveled officer, alongside several banking and administrative documents that, it alleges, were issued in his name.
The freelance investigators did not provide any evidence of the suspect's link to the Salisbury poisoning case but argued he was in the country when Skripal and his daughter were found slumped on a park bench.
A man named Fedotov, it said, arrived in London on March 2, two days before the suspected nerve agent attack, and flew back to Moscow through Rome after missing the return flight from London on March 4.
"It is unclear what Fedotov's role may have been, if any, in the preparation and execution of the poisoning operation. We could also not establish if he traveled to Salisbury on any of the days he was in the UK," the website admitted.
Separately, Bellingcat claimed the same GRU officer traveled to Bulgaria in 2015, days before a local arms dealer was severely poisoned with an unknown toxin.
A team of UK investigators is working on the case in Bulgaria, The Guardian newspaper quoted the Eastern European nation's prime minister, Boyko Borisov, as saying on Thursday.
Emilian Gebrev, who ran a Bulgarian arms exporting firm, reportedly fell into a coma in April 2015. His son and a company director were also afflicted. The three survived, but the cause of their sickness was never determined.
