Attorney General Peter Frank should pull the investigation for the so-called Tiergarten murder to himself. According to information of SPIEGEL, the Federal Prosecutor's Office suspects state Russian organs as the principal of the murder. A decision to take over is likely in the coming days.
Thus, Germany's top law enforcement agency would accuse Moscow of a contract murder in the Federal Republic. Diplomatic upheavals between Berlin seem inevitable against this background. A spokesman for Russia's president has so far rejected an involvement of the Russian state in the case.
Background of the case is the death of the Georgian citizen Zelimkahn Kangoshvili in late August in the small zoo in Berlin. He was shot in broad daylight by a cyclist. A short time later, the alleged perpetrator was arrested. His passport dismissed him as a Russian citizen named Vadim Sokolov.
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Research by the SPIEGEL and its cooperation partners "Bellingcat", "The Insider" and "The Dossier Center" promoted shortly after the fact evidence that suggests a state contractor: The victim Kangoshvili had in the second Chechnya war against Russian forces fought and later worked for Georgia and Ukraine against Russian interests.
The alleged perpetrator, Sokolov, apparently used a false identity: his passport was not stored in the Russian passport database, his address for the visa application for the EU was not correct, with his alleged employer knew him no one, his social security number was the 49-year-old only of 2019.
In addition to an elaborately constructed false identity, the research also revealed further indications of the Russian state: His entry in the database for national Russian ID documents was banned because the person was "protected by law". Telephone lines of its alleged employer were used in the past by branches of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
According to SPIEGEL information, the decisive factor for the takeover by the Federal Prosecutor's Office was that in 2015 Russia ceased international search for a suspected murderer whom forensic experts identified as Sokolov. According to the then perpetrator is a man named Vadim K. He is said to have killed a Russian businessman in 2013, and have also approached his victim on a bicycle. The German investigators now suspect that he was recruited by government agencies as a contract killer and sent to Berlin.
The case is reminiscent of the assassination attempt on the Russian ex-agent and defector Sergei Skripal. He and his daughter had attacked agents of the Russian military intelligence service GRU in March 2018 with the neurotoxin Nowitschok. Both survived. The West then expelled more than 100 Russian diplomats. The federal government declared four diplomats accused, suspected Russian spies to unwanted persons.
