The police have announced that Russian dissident businessman Nikolai Gluskov was murdered. He was found dead at his home in SW London on Monday. He was due to give evidence at a trial concerning the Russian airline Aeroflot in the High Court. This is breaking news but BBC News is reporting that the police have said that the cause of death was “compression of the neck”.
Mr Glushkov was found dead at his home in the New Malden area of London on 12 March.
Police say Mr Glushkov, whose family has been informed, died from "compression to the neck".
Police added there is, at this stage, no evidence linking the death to the incidents in Salisbury.
The Anti-Terrorism police are investigating this but they have not yet made a link with the nerve agent attack on the Skripals. From the Guardian before this development.
In the 1990s Glushkov was a director of the state airline Aeroflot and Berezovsky’s LogoVAZ car company. In 1999, as Berezovsky fell out with Vladimir Putin and fled to the UK, Glushkov was charged with money laundering and fraud. He spent five years in jail and was freed in 2004. Fearing further arrest, he fled to the UK and was granted political asylum.
In 2011 he gave evidence in a court case brought by Berezovsky against fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich, who remained on good terms with the Kremlin. Glushkov told the court he had effectively been taken hostage by Putin’s administration, which wanted to pressure Berezovsky to sell his stake in the TV station ORT.
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In 2017, during a trial in absentia in Russia, Glushkov was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing $123m from Aeroflot. The airline pursued the case in London. Glushkov had been defending himself, and told friends he had run out of money to hire lawyers. He was due to attend a hearing at 10.30am on Monday in the Rolls building, London’s commercial court, but failed to show up.
Also today the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson directly accused Putin of being responsibile for the nerve agent attack.
Speaking during a visit to a west London military bunker with the Polish foreign minister, Mr Johnson said the UK's "quarrel is with Putin's Kremlin".
"We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK, on the streets of Europe, for the first time since the Second World War," he said.
The car which the Skripals used is now in a sealed shipping container waiting to be forensically examined. [Correction] The car was being forensically examined in a sealed tent but was moved from there into the shipping container today.
Friday, Mar 16, 2018 · 6:25:55 PM +00:00
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Lib Dem FoP
One of the measures already being taken against Russian interests is a referal to Ofcom to withdraw Putin’s propaganda outlet RT’s broadasting licence. RT is currently available as a special UK edition on terrestrial and satellite TV free to air.
Ofcom said on Tuesday that it had written to the holder of RT’s UK broadcast licences to warn that “should the UK investigating authorities determine that there was an unlawful use of force by the Russian State against the UK”, the regulator would “consider this relevant to our ongoing duty to be satisfied that RT is fit and proper”.
Broadcasters in the UK have to be deemed fit and proper persons at all times in order to keep their licences and retain their broadcasting rights.
Ofcom is responsible for ensuring they continue to meet that test.Ofcom said its review would be carried out “on an expedited basis”, and that it would write to RT again “shortly” setting out details of the process.
OfCom has already sanctioned RT for misleading or biased news content.