So, now we come to the case of Nikolai Gorokhov, a lawyer entangled in the Prevezon case as a verification witness for the Justice Department who can expertly identify and authenticate Russian financial documents.
Gorokhov had intimate knowledge of the literature connected with the Magnitsky affair because he has represented the murdered lawyer’s justice-seeking wife and mother for six years.
On Wednesday, he was due to testify in the Moscow City Appeals Court to argue against another court’s refusal to re-investigate the conspiracy that Magnitsky uncovered, based on new evidence. That evidence suggested a former investigative head of the Russian Interior Ministry was fabricating or revising old files related to the case, and doing so at the behest of the Klyuev Group.
But on Tuesday, the 53-year-old Gorokhov plummeted from the fourth floor of his apartment building in Moscow. He was trying to move a bathtub to an apartment at the top of the building, according to the Russian press.
Curiously, first on the scene to report this as an accident involving a renovation gone wrong was LifeNews, a Russian outlet closely connected to the Russian security services and famous for inventing false news stories about the war in Ukraine and the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
“There’s still a lot of missing pieces to the whole story, but what we know for sure is that he was onto some of the most sensitive issues that the Russian government cares about in relation to the Magnitsky case,” Bill Browder, Magnitsky’s former client, told The Daily Beast in a phone call from London. “A lot of people weren’t happy with what he was doing in the Prevezon case.”
Gorokhov, Browder said, is currently in the intensive-care unit at Botkin Hospital with severe head trauma, although his injuries no longer appear life threatening.
So, we may yet learn if he fell or was pushed. Or if he will get his day in court as a witness for the U.S. government.
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