Skripal attack: Bellingcat names second Salisbury suspect
- by Lorene Schwartz
- in People
- — Oct 11, 2018
United Kingdom police have accused both men of carrying out the operation to poison former Russian double agent, Sergey Skripal with a nerve agent in the small English town of Salisbury back in March.
While the Skripals survived the attack, a woman died on June 30 after her partner picked up a discarded bottle of perfume containing the nerve agent that United Kingdom inspectors think was used to smuggle in the Novichok.
Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov told RT's editor-in-chief they had nothing to do with the Skripals' poisoning.
Bellingcat said its "identification process included multiple open sources, testimony from people familiar with the person, as well as copies of personally identifying documents, including a scanned copy of his passport".
Alexander Mishkin was born on July 13, 1979, in the village of Loyga, in the Archangelsk District in Northern European Russia. The town is exceptionally remote, inaccessible by road except in winter when the grounds freezes hard and normally reachable only by a narrow-gauge railway. He graduated from one of Russia's elite military medical academies and was recruited into the GRU during his studies.
It also added that it managed to somehow obtain copies of Mishkin's personal IDs and gathered "forensic evidence" of facial matches between "Mishkin" and Petrov. The award was likely connected to Russia's intervention in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where GRU special forces were covertly deployed in 2014.
Grozev said villagers recounted that Mishkin's grandmother had a photograph "that has been seen by everybody in the village, of Putin shaking Mishkin's hand and giving him the award".
A spokesman for the Home Office said it would not comment as it was a police investigation.
Putin insisted last month that the two men identified by British police as being behind the Skripals' poisoning were not members of the GRU.
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"It's easy to laugh at some of the GRU's poor tradecraft and their ability, but we should not underestimate them, nor indeed the unsafe and reckless use of nerve agent on our streets", the minister, Ben Wallace, told a security conference.
Former British foreign secretary William Hague says the revelations by Bellingcat and others on the GRU assassination attempt have "illuminated the duplicity of the endless denials" by the Kremlin of any Russian involvement in the murder bid.
Chepiga, 39, had been assigned the alter ego of Boshirov by 2010, Bellingcat said.
The intelligence service provided Mishkin with a new identity and corresponding paperwork.
The activities of the GRU have come under further scrutiny after the agency was accused of trying to hack the global chemical weapons watchdog which is investigating the Salisbury nerve agent attack.
Mr Grozev said that while Mishkin a had a "very sparse digital footprint" compared to Chepiga they had been able to piece together his identity using various databases, including telephone and auto insurance records.
Until early September 2014, Mishkin's registered home address in Moscow was Khoroshevskoe Shosse 76B - the address of the headquarters of the GRU.
Dr Alexander Mishkin goes by the alias "Alexander Petrov".
He was charged by Britain last month under the name of Alexander Petrov, though prosecutors said at the time that they believed the suspects had used aliases to enter Britain.
