German prosecutors say Russia ordered Berlin assassination
German prosecutors have filed murder charges against a Russian man accused in the brazen daylight murder in Berlin last year of a Georgian man.
Officials said the Russian state ordered the killing, adding to tensions between the countries.
The case prompted Germany in December to expel two Russian diplomats, citing a lack of cooperation with the investigation of the 23 August killing. Russia’s ambassador was called to the foreign ministry in Berlin again yesterday.
The victim, Tornike K, who also has widely been identified in reports as Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, was a Georgian of Chechen ethnicity who fought against Russian troops in Chechnya.
He had previously survived multiple assassination attempts and continued to receive threats after fleeing to Germany in 2016.
Yesterday federal prosecutors filed charges of murder and a violation of weapons laws in a Berlin district court against a Russian citizen they identified as Vadim K, alias Vadim S.
His last name was withheld in line with German privacy laws but has been widely reported as Vadim Krasikov, using the alias Vadim Sokolov.
They said that, at some point before mid-july last year, “state agencies of the central government of the Russian Federation” tasked him with “liquidating” the victim.
The suspect “accepted the state killing assignment”, prosecutors said in a statement. “He either hoped for a financial reward or he shared the motives of those who tasked him to kill a political opponent and take revenge for his participation in earlier conflicts with Russia.”
Prosecutors said that the killer approached Tornike K from behind on a bicycle in the Kleiner Tiergarten park and shot him in the torso with a
Glock handgun equipped with a silencer. When the victim fell, his attacker fatally shot him twice in the head. The suspect was arrested near the scene shortly afterwards and has been in custody ever since.
Prosecutors said the suspect flew from Moscow to Paris on 17 August using a passport that had been issued by a government office in Bryansk, Russia, in the name of his alias on 18 July – then continued to Warsaw on 20 August. The day before the killing, he travelled to Berlin.
The murder case and alleged Russian involvement in the 2015 hacking of the German parliament have weighed on relations between the two countries in recent months.
German foreign minister Heiko Maas said yesterday: “We once again invited the Russian ambassador for a meeting at the foreign ministry today to make our position unmistakably clear again to the Russian side.”