From WN

Investigative journalists at Bellingcat and the Insider released a report which identified one of the two suspects behind the Salisbury novichok poisoning attack in a new report published Wednesday, according to The Guardian.

The investigators at the Insider and Bellingcat said one of the two suspects who was previously called Ruslan Boshirov was really Col. Anatoliy Chepiga, a special forces military veteran who was awarded Russia’s highest state award, hero of the Russian Federation.

The report was Chepiga was given the honor in December 2014 when Russian officers were involved in the Ukraine conflict but he was also a veteran of the war in Chechnya.

It’s unclear why Chepiga won the award, but a government site claimed he “conducted a peace-keeping mission.”

Putin did not award other Russian military officers who were operating covertly in Ukraine at that time.

Chepiga along with his accomplice poisoned Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with novichok in March in Salisbury.

Both have recovered, but the discarded perfume bottle used to carry the nerve agent was later picked up by a couple, killing the woman, Dawn Sturgess, and injuring her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley.

Boshirov and the suspect named Alexander Petrov have been charged with attempted murder and conspiracy in the United Kingdom.

If Wednesday’s report is confirmed, it would dispute the claims of Russian President Vladimir Putin who said the two men were only civilians planning a visit to Salisbury cathedral and held no links to Russian state intelligence.

Russian television programs named the two suspects as Boshirov and Petrov who said they were only tourists who went to the city twice just to see the city’s cathedral.

Moscow has repeatedly denied the two men were GRU agents, even though British intelligence officials insisted they had evidence the men had ties to the Russian state and were skeptical of the highly organized Russian television interview.

Bellingcat and the Insider also uncovered passport files for Petrov which were stamped as “top secret” and “do not divulge.”

The files for Petrov also contained a telephone number for the Russian defence ministry.

The journalists said they found Chepiga through identifying military academies in eastern Russia where the two men likely studied, then matched a picture of the suspect from those records to the man wearing camouflage caught on security cameras in Salisbury.

They also tracked him to two addresses in Moscow and Khabarovsk and obtained passport data which had photographs which matched Chepiga to Boshirov.

The investigation revealed Chepiga was born on May 5, 1979, in Nikolaevka, in Russia’ far-east Amur region.

He then enrolled in a military academy at the age of 18.

Petrov is married and has a child, but the report did not contain more information about his background.

British authorities previously said they believed the names given for the suspects were pseudonyms but did not offer the men’s true names to the public.

The men’s claim of visiting the city only to visit Salisbury cathedral was disputed with CCTV images released by Scotland Yard which showed them traveling back and forth to Salisbury from Gatwick airport in the days before the attack.

The CCTV images showed the men walking in the opposite direction of the cathedral near Skripal’s house and the men departed Salisbury the day the poison was placed on Skripal’s doorknob.

The nerve agent use has sparked the worst diplomatic fallout between British and Russian officials in decades, with London and several allied countries expelling more than 100 Russian diplomats in March.

–WN.com, Maureen Foody

For more on this story and video go to: https://article.wn.com/view/2018/09/26/New_Report_Says_Salisbury_Poisoning_Suspect_Is_Highly_Decora/