Russian hit men flew to Geneva six times before Skripal attack
INTELLIGENCE agencies are investigating a series of trips to Geneva made by two Russian hit men before the Salisbury nerve agent attack.
Flight manifest details obtained by The Daily Telegraph show Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov made at least six trips to the Swiss city in the run-up to the assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal. Records show they booked nine separate flights to and from Geneva between November 2017 and February this year.
Whitehall sources said establishing who they met there was “absolutely key to the ongoing investigation”.
The manifests suggest they visited Geneva during Syria peace talks hosted by the UN and facilitated by Russia last November and December.
The records show they travelled widely in Europe from September 2016 – when Russia issued them passports under false names – until March this year when they flew to London to try to kill Col Skripal. The passports have not been used since. The men booked almost 30 flights in and out of Moscow, mainly on Aeroflot, the Russian state carrier, but also Air France, KLM and a Russian budget airline from Moscow to Bergamo in Italy.
The number of flights as well as accommodation costs in Geneva, Paris and Amsterdam suggest their missions were well-funded by the GRU, the agency they work for, dispelling suggestions the attempted hit was carried out on the cheap.
The Telegraph has established that Boshirov flew to Paris from Moscow on Dec 21 last year, then travelled to Geneva where he is said to have spent Christmas. He returned to Moscow on Dec 27.
Petrov appears to have flown to Paris from Moscow 10 days earlier, on Dec 11, and moved on to Geneva, seemingly waiting for his colleague. Petrov flew back to Russia only to return to Geneva for 10 days, spending New Year’s Eve in the city.
Petrov spent a further fortnight in the Swiss city, returning to Moscow on Feb 6. The pair then flew together to London three weeks later to target Col Skripal, a former GRU officer convicted of spying for
Britain. Col Skripal, 67, and his daughter Yulia, 33, survived the attack on March 4 but British woman Dawn Sturgess later died after inadvertently spraying herself with Novichok discarded in a perfume bottle.
The Telegraph reported this week that the men passed themselves off as wealthy businessmen to obtain UK visas. The frequent flights may have helped establish their credentials, making it easier to enter the UK.
The deployment of Novichok sparked a huge diplomatic crisis between the UK and its allies and Russia. The tensions were ratcheted up when Theresa May told Parliament on Tuesday that the men worked for the GRU.
But The Telegraph has learnt that authorities delayed naming the assassins until after the World Cup for fear of putting the lives of England football fans at risk. “It would have been unwise to identify the Russian agents before the World Cup,” said a Whitehall source, “To have done so would have put a huge number of British nationals in Russia in possible danger.”
Petrov and Boshirov were identified as suspects as early as April. They were caught on CCTV at Gatwick and Heathrow and in Salisbury. The evidence appeared conclusive in May when traces of Novichok were found in the room at a London hotel where the men stayed.
A decision was taken to keep quiet both in the hope the men would make one more trip to Europe where they could be caught and also to prevent England fans being targeted in Russia.
Yesterday, specialist military personnel were drafted in to begin the decontamination of Col Skripal’s home. ♦ Detectives investigating the murder on March 11 of Nikolai Glushkov, a Russian exile in London, believe he was previously the target of a poisoning attempt carried out by two men from Moscow who visited him in a Bristol hotel room, The Guardian newspaper reported last night.