Russia ‘hacked’ visa service for Skripal hit squad

RUSSIA’S domestic intelligence agency is feared to have infiltrated Britain’s St Petersburg consulate to ensure the agents sent to kill Sergei Skripal obtained UK visas.

A Russian IT specialist claims that he was put under pressure by the FSB intelligence agency to hack into the British consulate’s visa application system. The FSB recruited him to organise visas “for a couple of guys who need to visit the UK”.

The informant, known as “Vadim” and now seeking asylum in the United States, worked as chief technical officer for a company that handled visa applications for consulates in Russia, including Britain’s.

Vadim was approached by the FSB in June 2016, according to the investigation carried out by the Bellingcat and The Insider websites, three months before the Skripal hit squad began travelling through Europe on false passports.

British police have charged in absentia two men – named as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – with the attempted murder of Col Skripal, 67, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, who were poisoned with Novichok nerve agent smeared on the door handle of his home in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in March.

Col Skripal, a GRU agent who sold secrets to MI6, and Ms Skripal survived the attack, but Dawn Sturgess, a Salisbury resident, died after inadvertently spraying herself with nerve agent discarded by the assassins.

The men have since been unmasked as Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga, both senior officers with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency.

According to Bellingcat, Vadim was working for Tlscontact, which provides IT services to consulates, when a handler from the FSB told him: “It’s important that their [the two agents] passports are accepted and approved directly by the consulate, without any background checks, and without leaving any trace in the visa centre.”

Vadim said that the FSB had already infiltrated the British visa centre’s CCTV cameras and had a diagram of its computer network.

The pair subsequently obtained multiple-entry visas to the UK as well as multi-entry Schengen visas that allowed them to criss-cross Europe.

Vadim said he was coerced to sign an agreement to collaborate with the FSB after one of its officers threatened to jail his mother. He was asked to create a “backdoor” to the visa computer network, but said he sabotaged those efforts before he fled Russia in early 2017.

He insists he did not help the FSB infiltrate the British system, but his story raises the prospect that another insider did so.

Last night security sources cast doubt on the need for Russian intelligence to infiltrate British consular services. A well-placed source said the false identities of Boshirov and Petrov were “clean” aliases that would have aroused no suspicion so there would have been no need to hack into the visa computer system, which only risked drawing attention to the applications.

Tlscontact was not available for contact, and the Home Office declined to comment.