PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE OF THE REPUBLIC OF BULGARIA
- New images have been published of the Russian GRU assassination team working in Europe. A video from a case in Bulgaria shows a man connected to the 2015 poisoning of an arms dealer.
- The suspects in the Bulgarian poisoning are believed to be part of the same Russian unit that conducted the poison attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England.
- Russia is seemingly able to conduct its state-sponsored assassination attempts in Western Europe with little interference from domestic security services.
- But they keep failing to kill their targets. And they leave lots of evidence behind them.
- Read more on Insider.com.
Two suspects in the poisoning of a Bulgarian businessman, his son, and a business partner appear on CCTV footage of a hotel parking garage where the victims parked their cars just hours before they showed symptoms of poisoning, a Bulgarian prosecutor has confirmed.
The sighting — which shows a man wearing a bucket hat sauntering around a parking lot connected to the crime scene — is yet another example of how freely Russian assassination teams move in Europe, and how frequently they show up on the radar of security services here.
Open source investigators at Bellingcat had previously placed at least eight members of Russian Military Intelligence, known by Russians as GRU, in Bulgaria in the weeks before the 2015 attack conducting surveillance on Emelyan Gebrev, the apparent target.
The man in the bucket hat was part of the two-man team that poisoned the Skripals
Bellingcat, working with the German magazine Der Spiegel and the Russian website Insider (not related to Insider Inc.), says it has confirmed the men's cover identities as well as their real names, based on an examination of their travel documents, public database information, and using biometric information available on the men from public photos.
Gebrev, his son, and a business partner all fell sick the night of April 28, 2015, during a company party. They eventually recovered from what doctors said was a nerve agent similar to the poison used against GRU defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, in 2018.
Investigators determined that the Hotel Orbita parking garage was the likely site of the poisoning as it was located across Sofia from the party where the three men fell ill, but all three had parked their cars in spots apparently accessed by the assassination team previously in the day.
PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE OF THE REPUBLIC OF BULGARIA
One man in the parking lot was also captured by cameras surrounding the hotel. He was identified as Denis Sergeyev, a GRU officer operating under the name Sergey Fedotov. Sergeyev had been previously identified as a member of the two-man team that poisoned the Skripals. Three other people in Salisbury — a police officer and two local residents — were also poisoned in what investigators say was residue from the attempt on Sergei.
In both the Bulgaria and Salisbury attacks, the victims survived potentially fatal doses.
"This guy is not some big-time Kremlin foe"
Members of the GRU team identified in Bulgaria have also been accused of attempting to foment a coup in Montenegro in 2016.
Neither prosecutors nor outside investigators have described a motive for the attempt on Gebrev. However, Gebrev runs a mid-sized arms firm that has legally sold weapons to Georgia and the Middle East. While these sales went against Kremlin policies for supporting the government of Georgia in its brief 2008 war with Russia, as well as supplying US allies in Iraq and Syria, analysts say these exports were in such small numbers that it remains baffling why the GRU would target Gebrev with such a complicated, lethal operation.
"This guy is not some big-time Kremlin foe nor is he a defected Russian asset that could be targeted for being a traitor," one former intelligence officer for a Central European country who often worked in Bulgaria, told Insider.
"It doesn't make a lot of sense based on what we know, but it's possible Gebrev was caught up in something that hasn't been made public yet. Unless that's the case, this assassination [attempt] doesn't make a lot of sense despite the obvious evidence it was the GRU."
Read the original article on Insider