US intelligence agencies may have succeeded in clarifying the identity of the man who allegedly shot and killed Georgian Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin at the end of August. According to information from SPIEGEL and its international search partners "Bellingcat", "The Insider" and "Dossier Center" is a 48-year-old Russian citizen.
The man entered the EU with a real Russian passport with the fake identity of a "Vadim Sokolov", as SPIEGEL and its partners revealed last week. According to information from intelligence services, the US authorities have informed German authorities about what they consider to be the true identity of the man.
According to SPIEGEL information, the alleged hired gunman had flown on 17 August from Moscow to Paris and from there three days later on to the Polish capital Warsaw. There he moved into a hotel room in the city center, which he had rented for several days. After his arrest in Germany, Polish security authorities were able to secure personal belongings from him at the hotel. The identity of the man was completely unclear at the time.
According to information from SPIEGEL and its partners, the suspect should have been a member of a unit of the Russian Interior Ministry before he was sentenced to a long prison term for murder at the beginning of the nineties.
The allegedly true identity is an important puzzle in the question of whether the murder of Khangoshvili may have been commissioned or even organized by a Russian secret service or the regime of the Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. The Kremlin has denied Russian participation in the murder in Berlin.
In the second Chechen war Zelimkhan Khangoshvili had fought against Russian troops and was later active as an informer and mediator for Georgian and Ukrainian authorities and US services.
Khangoshvili came to Germany in 2016 - previously he lived in the Ukraine. He escaped there for security reasons after surviving an attack in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, where he was hit by several shots. In Germany, he was in the meantime led on the basis of Russian intelligence information as an Islamist threat, but later re-issued.
The murder in Berlin commemorates the attack on former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK last year. At that time, the Russian military intelligence GRU had tried to kill the two. After that, a diplomatic crisis had come between the West and Russia. More than a hundred Russian diplomats had been expelled from various countries, including Germany.
The SPIEGEL, Bellingcat, The Insider and the Dossier Center had already more than a week ago evidence of the alleged real identity of "Vadim Sokolov". Up to now, SPIEGEL and its partners had waived their publication, as contradictory information was available from several sources.
