Did Putin’s spies help assassins get visas into UK?
RUSSIAN security services infiltrated the British Embassy in Moscow and manipulated staff to obtain visas for the Salisbury assassins, it was dramatically claimed last night.
Moscow spies are alleged to have had a ‘direct influence’ on those responsible for granting documents to the UK – allowing the hitmen to fly into London despite obvious holes in their cover story.
One of the pair, using the alias Ruslan Boshirov, has been revealed to be special forces soldier Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, 39. He and his accomplice Alexander Petrov had claimed to be sports nutrition businessmen who had come to Salisbury as tourists to visit the city’s famous cathedral.
But one of the investigative journalists who helped unmask Chepiga’s real identity said their cover story was so flimsy it should not have fooled those responsible for issuing UK visas.
Roman Dobrokhotov, of investigative website The Insider, said he had evidence that the Russian security services manipulated visa officials. He said the full claims would be published next week.
Mr Dobrokhotov said it was ‘pretty strange’ that Chepiga managed to slip into Britain without alarm bells ringing. He added: ‘ We know he went to Britain with a business visa and that it is very difficult to [get]. You have to have a lot of papers proving that you really have a business. He didn’t have any business and it was very easy to check that he has no biography.
‘So our theory is that our security services, Russian security services, obtained some access to the British Embassy and the next part of our investigation will be dedicated to this topic.’ He added: ‘It is not just manipulating in the sense of they changed their decisions, it is direct influence the Russian security services had on those people who were participating in this scheme of making visas.
‘That is absolutely alarming and very surprising, even for us, and I guess for British citizens.’
Mr Dobrokhotov has worked with the investigative website Bellingcat on a series of revelations about the two men blamed for poisoning double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March. The British Embassy referred all queries to the Home Office, which said last night: ‘We reject these claims entirely. Applications of this type would be decided by a visa officer in the UK and not in the British Embassy in Moscow.’
Meanwhile, a Bellingcat journalist, who writes under the pseudonym Moritz Rakuszizky, told BBC’s Newsnight he believes they are close to publicly unmasking the second suspect known as Petrov.
He said: ‘We think he is someone who is at the captain level or a senior lieutenant level. We don’t think he is of the same ilk as Chepiga.’ Russian military sources have expressed their surprise that someone as high-ranking and decorated as Chepiga, who has been awarded his homeland’s highest military honour, would be dispatched to the field.
They said it was further evidence that the assassination was ordered at the most senior level of the Russian state.
Chepiga’s cover was further blown apart yesterday when he was identified by a classmate from the remote village where he went to school, near Russia’s border with China.
Locals in Berezovka identified him from the Salisbury CCTV pictures. ‘This is him,’ confirmed a former female school friend. ‘This is 100 per cent him. The eyes are almost black.’