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(London) – One of the two suspects of the poisoning of an ex-spy in England is a doctor working for the Russian military intelligence and who went to Britain under a pseudonym, announced Monday the group Bellingcat investigators.
Bellingcat said on his website that the man identified by the British authorities as being Alexander Petrov was actually Alexander Mishkin, a doctor working for the Russian military intelligence unit known as GRU.
The British authorities said that last month, during the attack by a nervous agent against Sergey Skripal and his daughter, two Russians had claimed that Petrov was a borrowed name.
The other suspect also went to Salisbury, England, under the pseudonym Ruslan Boshirov. – But it's a Russian agent decorated with the name of Anatoliy Chepiga, reported Bellingcat last month.
The group said it would provide forensic evidence and other information used to conclude that Petrov was Mishkine on Tuesday. The Russian and British governments have made no immediate comment on the Bellingcat report.
The poisoning of Skripal, a former Russian agent convicted of espionage on behalf of Britain, has become a major international incident. British authorities have said that the former spy and his daughter, Yulia, had been sickened by a Soviet-made nerve agent.
British Prime Minister Theresa May said the attack was probably ordered at the highest levels of the Russian government, a claim vehemently rejected by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The latest Bellingcat investigation revealed that Mishkin was born in 1979 in Archangelsk district, northern Russia, and had graduated from elite military medicine academies, where he had followed a doctor training in the Russian Navy.
He was recruited by the GRU secret, given the secret identity of Alexander Petrov when he was stationed in Moscow and was making numerous trips to Ukraine, the investigative group announced. .
After Britain charged the two Russians with attempting to kill the Skripals, the suspects appeared on Russian television to deny their role in the Salisbury poisonings. They said that they went to town to visit his cathedral.
The father and daughter survived after a long stay in the hospital in intensive care. But the nerve agent killed a Briton, Dawn Sturgess, and severely sickened her partner.
British police said they thought the couple had been exposed to the substance in June because of traces in the bottle containing Novichok used to poison the Skripals a few months earlier.
The use of a nerve agent banned by the Soviet Union during the Cold War in a small English town drew attention to the GRU, a Russian military intelligence unit that, according to reports Western officials, is linked to a number of recent computer hacks.
British, Dutch and US officials have accused the GRU of trying to hack into the computers of international agencies, to be behind a devastating cyberattack against Ukraine in 2017 and to be behind stolen e-mails that led to the 2016 US presidential election.
Last week, the Dutch authorities alleged that the GRU had tried to defeat the global control of chemical weapons, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
The US Department of Justice has also indicted seven GRU officers for alleged international piracy against more than 250 athletes, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear power company, a Swiss chemical lab, and the chemical weapons watchdog.
