NAILED

FSB Hit Squad That Tailed Navalny Also Followed Slain Opposition Leader Nemtsov, Says Bellingcat

Investigation shows the hit squads that trailed Navalny and other reformers also tracked Boris Nemtsov before his murder seven years ago.

The Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down on a bridge by the Kremlin seven years ago, had been followed by the same FSB hit squad that later targeted Alexei Navalny and other dissident reformers. A joint investigation by the open-source intelligence group Bellingcat, investigative news site The Insider, and the BBC found proof officers of the FSB's Second Service had tailed Nemtsov for 10 months before his assassination. Five Chechen men were jailed for the murder but have since recanted their confessions, saying they had been hired to follow the Putin rival. After poring through FSB travel records, the investigators found that one officer, Valery Sukharev, trailed Nemtsov on 13 consecutive trips, stopping only a week before his death. The same FSB unit has also been implicated in the poisoning of Nemtsov protégé Vladimir Kara-Murza, writer Dmitry Bykov, and Navalny himself. All three survived.