Russian death squad is hunting Putin critics, says jailed dissident
An imprisoned British-Russian dissident who was twice poisoned has appeared in court claiming that an FSB “death squad” is at work eliminating opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Following the death of Alexei Navalny last week, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Cambridge University graduate, is one of the most prominent political prisoners in Russia. He is serving a 25-year sentence for treason, the longest term handed to an opposition figure since Soviet times.
Yesterday he appeared in court by video over a complaint against Russia’s Investigative Committee for failing to look into two poisoning attempts against him in 2015 and 2017, which he says were carried out on the orders of the Kremlin.
In the first, Kara-Murza nearly died of kidney failure, though no cause was determined. He was hospitalised with a similar illness in 2017, and put into a medically induced coma. His wife said doctors confirmed he was poisoned.
“There is a death squad within the FSB, a group of professional killers in the service of the state, whose task is to physically eliminate political opponents of the Putin regime,” he told the court.
He said investigative journalists had shown that the group of FSB officers who poisoned him had also poisoned Navalny
with a nerve agent in 2020, and surveilled Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov before he was killed in 2015.
Born in Moscow, Kara-Murza, 42, a father of three, moved to Britain with his mother when he was a teenager and graduated from Cambridge, where he studied history.
In a nod to Navalny, he said: “We owe it ... to our fallen comrades to continue to work with even greater strength and achieve what they lived and died for.”
Russian authorities have been quick to suppress public dissent about the death of Navalny, who is widely believed to have been murdered by the state, and whose body has not been released. Police in Moscow are said to have tried to confiscate every copy of a Russian weekly that had a photograph of Navalny on its front page along with the words: “But there’s hope!”
A group of a dozen Russian priests has written an open letter to Putin demanding the release of Navalny’s body. “Even Pontius Pilate, who decided to execute Christ out of fear of being disloyal to the emperor, did not interfere with the release of the Saviour’s body and its burial,” they wrote.