UK allows Russia to regularly assassinate opponents with impunity. (very, very long article)
"It was suicide: Mr. Young smoked a cigarette and had a can of soda by the window and decided to jump even though he was afraid of heights. So he opened the window all the one-and-a-half foot it can be opened, took a run-up at it and jumped out head-first, leaving scratch-marks with his finger-nails on the outer windowsill in the process."
"You see, Commander Bond, there was no russian assassin. Just forget this nasty episode. We don't want to upset Putin, do we?"
very, very long article
https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-14-suspected-hits-on-british-soil?utm_term=.dfEpRWZn1#.gb7XZRbmE
Earlier this week, we revealed that US spy agencies had handed the British government high-grade intelligence that the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichnyy, who died in Surrey in 2012, was likely assassinated on the direct orders of the Kremlin – but the authorities sidelined that and other evidence pointing to murder, instead declaring that he had died of natural causes. Today, we can reveal that US intelligence officials suspect a further 13 people – including Berezovsky and eight members of his circle – have been assassinated on British soil by Russia’s security services or mafia groups, two forces that sometimes work in tandem.
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Russian assassins have been able to kill in Britain with impunity over the past decade, 17 current and former British and American intelligence officials told BuzzFeed News. The reasons for Britain’s reticence, they said, include fear of retaliation, police incompetence, and a desire to preserve the billions of pounds of Russian money that pour into British banks and properties each year. As a result, Russia is making what one source called increasingly “bold moves” in the UK without fear of reprisals.
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May personally intervened to delay the public inquiry into Litvinenko’s death, citing the need to protect “international relations” with Russia. And in the Perepilichnyy case, her government has withheld sensitive evidence from the inquest on “national security” grounds. Downing Street, the Home Office and Scotland Yard did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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The existence of American intelligence linking the 14 deaths in Britain to Russia was confirmed by four current US intelligence officials with direct knowledge of the information the spy agencies had gathered on each case. In certain instances, they said, it was possible to say with high or moderate confidence that assassinations had been carried out on Putin’s command. In others, it could not be determined with certainty whether individuals had been targeted by the Kremlin, murdered by Russian mafia figures, or deliberately driven to suicide – and they could not rule out the possibility that some of the deaths could be unconnected to Russia. But in all 14 cases, “based on what we know and intelligence gathered in the field and analysed,” one of the officials said, “you can safely say that the strongest conclusion is that circumstances suggest Russian involvement in the deaths of these men and then demand more investigation from UK."
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Several senior Scotland Yard and MI6 sources strongly denied that the British government would ever cover up an assassination for political reasons. But others disagreed. Carl Davenport, a former Scotland Yard counter-terror officer, said the government withholds evidence from coroners “quite a lot” in order to pass off Russian-linked deaths as suicides, in part because it’s “diplomatically easier” and they are “scared of angering Russia, who are known to be quite ruthless”. Nigel Anderson, a former MI6 officer, said there is a clear pattern of “brazen” Russian assassinations in Britain “right out in the daylight” – and it has been allowed to continue because “the UK is soft on such things”.
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Berezovsky and many of his dead associates were so deeply connected to organised crime in Russia that intelligence sources said it was difficult to tell whether orders to kill them may have come from the government, the mafia, or both. Mark Galeotti, an expert in the international activities of the Russian mafia, said the country’s security services frequently cooperate with organised crime groups. “How it works is an order comes down from the top saying this person needs to die,” he said, and the security services have to work out “What is the most efficient way of doing this?” That might be to send state agents to conduct a sophisticated and undetectable killing, he said, or it may be simpler to enlist some “hoodlums” to carry out a crude hit. At the same time, Galeotti said, “technically challenging organised crime killings” are often carried out by “state agents basically moonlighting”.
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Walton, the former Scotland Yard counter-terror chief, said the failure by the force’s homicide team to carry out even the most cursory investigation into Young’s death was “really alarming”, and he was “astonished that there weren’t forensics done”. Given Young's fears for his safety and his connections to Berezovsky and other prominent Russians who had died suspiciously, Walton said, “that should have been treated as a suspicious death from the off”.
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Any time Berezovsky launched a new broadside on the Kremlin, a Scotland Yard counter-terror officer who monitored his safety said, a flurry of activity would be picked up by “billions of pounds of GCHQ interception apparatus staring at Russian telecommunications”, suggesting that the threat level had risen. “It was almost as if you got a chill wind from the East,” he said.
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The lawyer hired a team of bodyguards, and at the end of February he told his uncle: “If anything happens to me in the next few weeks, it will not be an accident.” The following week, on 3 March 2004, his private helicopter nose-dived into a field on the approach to Bournemouth airport, killing him and the pilot in a ball of flames. His inquest, a judicial inquiry to determine the cause of death, ruled the crash was an accident – the helicopter went down in poor weather – though the coroner acknowledged that the case had “all the ingredients for an espionage thriller”.
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Then, on 7 January 2007, Golubev was found dead in an armchair at his London flat, shortly after flying in from Moscow. Scotland Yard quickly announced that the death was not suspicious. Bizarrely, however, Russia’s prosecutor general Yuri Chaika announced that there were “all grounds to suppose” Golubev had been killed. US intelligence sources said such pronouncements were often designed as a warning to other Russian exiles that crossing the Kremlin could cost them their lives.
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The would-be killer was a Chechen with FSB links by the name of Movladi Atlangeriev, who landed at Heathrow Airport in June, bought a firearm, and asked to meet Berezovsky. “All the intelligence given to me suggested that this man was here to assassinate Boris,” his Special Branch protection officer told BuzzFeed News. Berezovsky was airlifted to Israel, and a surveillance team arrested Atlangeriev, who had made his way to the oligarch’s office lobby with a gun. But rather than putting him on trial, the British government merely revoked his visa and bundled him on a plane back to Russia, refusing to comment publicly on the operation.
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The oligarch had seemed “absolutely fine” when they parted ways, Bell said, “and by the time I got home he had died”. He said he heard of his friend’s death from Berezovsky, who phoned him and announced sorrowfully: “They’ve done Badri.” Bell agreed with Berezovsky that their friend had been murdered. “They have all sorts of stuff that can kill you without leaving a trace,” he said. “The British government backs off when there’s a suspicious death linked to the Russians because they don’t want to upset the Russians and they don’t want to have to find them guilty of something that might cause an international incident.”
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But Elizaveta had enlisted an eminent German asphyxiation expert, Dr Bernd Brinkmann, to examine photographs of Berezovsky’s body, and he announced that “the strangulation mark is completely different to the strangulation mark in hanging” – circular, instead of V-shaped. And the first paramedic on the scene told the inquest it was “strange” that Berezovsky’s face was “quite a deep purple” when when victims of hanging are usually pale.
There was also a fresh wound on the back of Berezovsky’s head and a fractured rib, as well as the presence of an unidentified fingerprint on the shower rail.
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Leaning out of the window, they looked down at the last sight their father’s eyes took in and saw the sharp iron fence looming up below. It made no sense to them that, from such a small opening, he would have hurled himself on to those spikes – especially because he had an almost debilitating fear of heights. And then, they spotted something that gave them chills.
On either side of the outside windowsill, there were rows of faint scratch marks in the dirt, about as far apart as the fingers on a hand. “I guess it’s him fighting for his life,” Sasha said.
They took photographs of the inside of the flat, the narrow window opening, and the marks on the sill. That, already, was more than the police had done.
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At the funeral, which 200 people attended, the sisters said they were approached by a man they didn’t know, who warned them to “stop asking questions” about how their father had died because it “wasn’t safe”.
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BuzzFeed News has learned that, while the police shut down the case, dismissed the Russian connection, and rebuffed the concerns of Young’s family and friends, Britain’s spy agencies were secretly asking their American counterparts if his risky dealings in Moscow had finally caught up with him.
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