Third Salisbury suspect wanted for poison attack in Bulgaria
BULGARIA has opened an investigation following reports that a third suspect in the Salisbury attack was also involved in a 2015 poisoning in the Balkan nation.
Tsvetan Tsvetanov, a senior official in the ruling GERB party, said intelligence officers would present their evi- dence on the topic on Thursday at a parliamentary security committee.
“I am certain that the necessary coordination has already been set up between the Bulgarian, British and European authorities on the case and they are working actively on it,” Mr Tsvetanov said.
It comes after Bellingcat, an investigative group, reported an alleged Russian military intelligence agent arrived in Bulgaria in April 2015, a few days before Emilian Gebrev, a Bulgarian businessman, was poisoned by an unidentified substance.
Mr Gebrev, an arms industry executive, survived but authorities still do not know who poisoned him.
Bellingcat said on its website that the 45-year-old Russian agent travelled under the alias Sergei Vyacheslavovich Fedotov and had been “conclusively identified as an agent of Russian military intelligence” for Moscow’s GRU agency. Bellingcat said Fedotov also was suspected of being involved in the Novichok nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the former Russian spy, and his daughter, Yulia, in the English city of Salisbury. He arrived in Britain two days before the March 2018 attack.
Both Skripals survived after weeks in the hospital and after their release were taken to an undisclosed location for their safety.
British officials blamed the attack on the GRU and have charged two Russian suspects. The men travelled under the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Russian authorities denied involvement and Moscow refused to extradite them to Britain.
Britain’s Metropolitan Police said its investigation team “continues to pursue a number of lines of inquiry, including identifying any other suspects who may have been involved in carrying out or planning the attack”.
“We are not prepared to discuss further details of what remains an ongoing investigation,” the Met said in a statement.
The Skripal poisonings set off a wave of recriminations between Britain and Moscow, prompting the expulsion of dozens of diplomats from Russia, the UK and countries that are Britain’s allies.