Tiergarten murder trial: a professional violent criminal? | tagesschau.de

Status: 25.11.2021 1:42 p.m.

A Russian journalist testified in the trial of the zoo murder. He provided numerous clues about the background of the accused. The defense had a hard time with the witness.

By Silvia Stöber, tagesschau.de

It was only one question for the record on the 51st day of the trial in the zoo murder trial: The presiding judge Olaf Arnoldi asked the young man on the witness stand where he lived. But this is exactly a problem for the Russian journalist Roman Dobrochotow.

The editor-in-chief of the investigative platform The Insider recently had to leave Moscow. His home and that of his family members were ransacked, and computers and cell phones were confiscated. The Insider, like other media outlets in Russia, has been declared a “foreign agent”, making their work much more difficult.

The Insider specializes in investigating crimes committed by employees of the security authorities, as Dobrochotov explained in court. Together with two other research organizations, the platform uncovered the background to the accused: Vadim Sokolov is an alias of the real person Vadim Krasikov, who is connected to Russian security services.

While numerous evidence on this thesis has been collected in court, defense attorney Robert Unger continues to insist that his client is called Sokolov. Accordingly, Unger tried to question the findings of Dobrochotov and his colleagues.

The Phantom

After researching Russian state databases, they came to the conclusion that the person Sokolov was created in the Small Zoo a few weeks before the murder. An incomplete tax file refers to this.

There you will find data of a domestic passport, comparable to the German identity card. Dobrochotow and his colleagues did not find this data in other relevant databases – in their opinion, evidence that the domestic passport does not exist.

When Unger doubted this, Dobrochotov replied that the non-existence of a document was difficult to prove. “But it would be easy to present the national passport as evidence in court,” said the journalist. So far, the defense has presented no evidence of Sokolov’s existence. The mother mentioned by the defendant did not propose her as a witness either.

Dobrochotov reacted confidently to questions from Unger on other topics. When the defense attorney asked Dobrochotov to do better research at the end of his questions, there was clear resentment on the part of the prosecution.

The bicycle killer

Without evidence, Unger’s line of defense crumbles, while the image of the perpetrator Krasikov takes on more and more contours. Dobrochotov contributed to this when he summarized the results of his investigations on bullet points on the prosecution side.

These include a murder in Moscow in 2013. A camera recording shows a man on a bicycle approaching the victim and then killing him with several shots.

Not only did the perpetrator proceed in a similar way in the Kleiner Tiergarten. The photo of an internationally advertised manhunt by the Russian police for a Vadim Krasikov is so similar to the accused that facial assessors are very likely to assume that the person is the same.

Official data shows that Krasikov traveled to Ukraine with his family after the murder. Dobrochotov found a taxi driver who recognized Krasikov after driving to the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. A relative from Kharkiv, who was also heard as a witness, confirmed that the Krasikovs were in Ukraine at the time.

Use in political unrest?

More and more clues are also being added to another murder in 2007 in the Russian region of Karelia. According to the research, Krasikov was one of three suspects, all of whom are said to be linked to Russian security services.

One of them, by the name of Vladimir Fomenko, was recognized by the victim’s brother in a wedding photo of Krasikov, as Krasikov wrote in a letter to the court.

Research by Dobrochotov and his colleagues revealed that Fomenko and Krasikov traveled to Kyrgyzstan together. President Rosa Otunbayeva gave Fomenko a Glock 100 pistol, apparently for activities related to the political unrest there.

Dobrochotow and his colleagues gained most of their knowledge from publicly accessible databases and interviews. Partner Bellingcat also received data from people with access to closed databases in Russia, whose legitimacy, in addition to the defense, also questioned Judge Arnoldi.

But together with the results of the investigation by the German authorities, the thesis that the defendant was in contact with the Vympel special unit of the domestic secret service FSB and possibly spent his entire career with the “siloviki” – the military and security services of Russia – condenses.

For Dobrochotow and his team at The Insider, investigative work has personal consequences. Two thirds of the editorial staff had to leave the country for fear of prosecution, he said. There, too, they would still be pursued with cyber attacks.

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