The German Foreign Office has expelled two Russian diplomats from Berlin on Wednesday with immediate effect, after a daylight assassination took place in a park in August.
The state prosecutor started the case this week and investigated a former 40-year-old Zelimkhan Khangoshvili who was a Chechen rebel commando during the second Chechen war in 2001 till 2005.
The former rebel Commando, who is of Georgian nationality, has been investigated along with suspected Kremlin links to the murder that took place in a Berlin park.
The prosecutor said that there is “sufficient factual evidence” he was shot dead “on behalf of state agencies of the Russian Federation.”
The German Foreign Office said in a statement, “The foreign ministry has today declared two employees of the Russian embassy in Berlin as personae non grata with immediate effect.”
According to Bellingcat who are an investigative journalism website that specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence and German magazine Der Spiegel, the Russian assassin travelled to Germany under the name of Vadim Sokolov.
However, it has been uncovered that the assassin’s real name is Vadim Krasikov, who is a suspect in the 2013 murder of a Russian businessman in Moscow.
The assassination in Berlin echoes the attempted murder of the former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018 using Novichoc.
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