Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Skripal assassin & a spy wedding
Photo link to GRU chief behind Salisbury poisoning
ONE of the Russian operatives accused of the novichok attack in Salisbury was at a wedding hosted by a Moscow intelligence chief just nine months earlier.
Anatoly Chepiga, 40, was at the July 2017 wedding of the daughter of Major General Andrei Averyanov of Russian military intelligence agency the GRU.
Averyanov is the feared commander of the GRU’S 29155 unit, which oversaw the Salisbury attack on ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
The unit has been behind major assassinations and launches covert operations including a campaign to destabilise Moldova, a bid to kill an arms smuggler in Bulgaria and a thwarted coup in Montenegro. Chepiga and fellow operative Alexander Mishkin were accused by British prosecutors last year of carrying out the March 2018 nerve agent attack in Salisbury, Wilts, which resulted in the death of local woman Dawn Sturgess.
The pair went on TV denying the claims, insisting they were innocent tourists visiting Salisbury cathedral at the time of the Skripals’ poisoning. But despite his denials, and those of President Vladimir Putin, Chepiga is a highly decorated GRU Colonel.
And now the wedding images, which were published on the Bellingcat investigative news site, have nailed him as one of Russia’s top operatives with links to one of its most shadowy spy units that heads up Putin’s assassination squads.
Former government counterterrorism advisor Colonel Richard Kemp told the Mirror: “This is further evidence of this person’s links to the GRU and I believe it does indicate conclusively his involvement.”
Ms Sturgess, 44, died weeks after the Salisbury attack after she and partner Charlie Rowley, 45, found a discarded bottle of novichok.