Horrific fall that sparked probe into a string of suspicious deaths

IT WAS the terrible fate of Scot Young, a Scottish financier, property magnate and associate of Boris Berezovsky, that persuaded us to investigate this pattern of suspicious deaths.

Young was impaled on railings after falling in near-impossible circumstances from an upperfloor window of the apartment in Marylebone, Central London, that he shared with his American girlfriend Noelle Reno. His daughters were astounded at the idea he should have attempted suicide, having spoken to him on the phone just a short while before.

Over the course of two years, our team connected Young to a web of deaths in the UK – and one in the US – all of which had glaring links to Russia. We obtained hundreds of boxes of documents, hours of surveillance footage and audio recordings, a huge cache of digital files from forensically restored mobile phones and computers, bags of discarded police evidence and readouts of multiple secret US intelligence files.

We tracked down and interviewed more than 200 people, while also gathering information from over 40 current and former intelligence and law-enforcement sources on both sides of the Atlantic.

Reporting this story was, at times, a risky business. A man in a black car appeared every night for months outside one reporter’s house, another came home to find personal items had been moved around in his bedroom, and it appeared one team member was being followed.