Russia: Opposition leader Nemtsov monitored by FSB months before assassination

Investigations by Bellingcat, The Insider and the BBC have revealed that in the days and months leading up to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, the Russian opposition leader was under close surveillance by the same Russian intelligence service that tracked down Russian dissidents. -Mourza, Dmitry Bykov and Alexei Navalny, before the assassination attempts against them with poison.

Boris Nemtsov, the deputy prime minister of Boris Yeltsin’s government, was considered a possible successor before Vladimir Putin’s surprise appointment to the presidency in December 1999, to become a vocal critic of the Kremlin’s strongman and dictator. Boris Nemtsov had called for international sanctions against the Russian leadership, opposed the Donbas war and annexation of Crimea, and called for an independent inquiry into the downing of a Malaysian Airlines plane in pro-Russian autonomy.

The investigation was based on a file of reservations on trains and planes of the Russian secret services, which records the movements of the persons monitored by the FSB and, fatally, the movements of the secret agents who monitor them.

The results of the investigation showed that, for 10 months before his assassination, Boris Nemtsov was being monitored on the move by the Second Office of the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB.

Agents stopped tracking him just days before he was shot dead in the shadow of the Kremlin on February 27, 2015.

Authorities then blamed the murder on Ramzan Kadyrov’s former Chechen agent, Zaur Dadayev, who was convicted by a military court of killing Boris Nemtsov, to say his confession had been extracted. Human rights groups at the time had complained that Chechen had confessed to the murder under torture.

However, neither the official investigation nor the trial found the motive for the murder, nor was the person who ordered the extermination of the Russian dissident found.

The investigation showed that, months before the assassination, the FSB detachment was monitoring Boris Nemtsov on all his travels in Russia, specifically between May 2014 and February 2015. The monitoring was carried out according to the model of other personalities. before the victims of the poisoning: the group arrived a few hours or the day before Nemtsov’s arrival and left shortly before or shortly after his departure. During his last trip to the city of Yaroslavl, where he was a member of the city council, Russian intelligence agents did not watch Boris Nemtsov. A few days later, he was killed in Moscow.

The results of the investigation raise questions about the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, and in particular the question of whether the Chechen group acted, assuming it was involved in the assassination, regardless of Russia’s security mechanisms.

SOURCE: AMPE

Source: Capital

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