Salisbury novichok attack: Second suspect in Skripal poisoning identified as Russian doctor Alexander Mishkin
Suspect was recruited to Russian military intelligence agency in 2010, investigative website says
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Your support makes all the difference.The second suspect in the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury has been named as Russian military doctor Dr Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin, by investigative website Bellingcat.
Late last month the website named the first suspect as Anatoliy Chepiga, a military colonel who had been the recipient of Russia’s highest state award.
The pair have been accused by British police of attempting to assassinate the Skripals with the cold-war era nerve agent novichok.
Following the accusation, the two men, who had been travelling with documents naming them as Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, said they had travelled from Russia to Salisbury to see the city’s cathedral.
Theresa May said the attack was “almost certainly” approved by senior members of the Kremlin, but she did not directly accuse Vladimir Putin.
London police said they would not comment on speculation about the real identities of the two men facing charges, in response to a query about the latest Bellingcat report, and repeated they believed the men had used aliases, Reuters reports.
Bellingcat said Dr Mishkin is “a trained military doctor in the employ of the GRU” – Russia’s military intelligence agency, and published a scanned copy of his passport.
They said he was born in July 1979 in the village of Loyga in the Archangelsk district of northern Russia, and until September 2014 his registered home address in Moscow was the same as the headquarters of the GRU.
The site says: “During his medical studies, Mishkin was recruited by the GRU, and by 2010 had relocated to Moscow, where he received his undercover identity – including a second national ID and travel passport – under the alias Alexander Petrov.”
The report added: “In the period 2011-2018, Alexander Mishkin travelled extensively under his new identity.”
Dr Mishkin is believed to have changed little about his alias, keeping the same first name, birth date and first names of his parents.
“Bellingcat‘s identification process included multiple open sources, testimony from people familiar with the person, as well as copies of personally identifying documents, including a scanned copy of his passport,” the website said.
Russia denies any involvement in the poisoning.