Thu, Dec 17th 2020 12:27pm
Glyn Moody
A joint investigation between Bellingcat and The Insider, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN, has discovered voluminous telecom and travel data that implicates Russia s Federal Security Service (FSB) in the poisoning of the prominent Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny. Moreover, the August 2020 poisoning in the Siberian city of Tomsk appears to have happened after years of surveillance, which began in 2017 shortly after Navalny first announced his intention to run for president of Russia.
That s hardly a surprise. Perhaps more interesting for Techdirt readers is the story of how Bellingcat pieced together the evidence implicating Russian agents. The starting point was finding passengers who booked similar flights to those that Navalny took as he moved around Russia, usually earlier ones to ensure they arrived in time but without making their shadowing too obvious. Once Bellingcat had found some names that kept cropping up too
Russian minister says Navalny poisoning reports funny to read
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that reports about the details surrounding the poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny are funny to read, in an apparent reference to a CNN-Bellingcat investigation into the attack. We are already used to the fact that the United States and other Western countries simply announce in the media yet another set of accusations against Russia, be it hackers, or some kind of a sensation about the double or even triple poisoning of Navalny, Lavrov said during a news conference following a visit to Croatia.