Zelimkhan "Tornike" Khangoshvili was an ethnic Chechen Georgian who was a former military commander for the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria during the Second Chechen War, and a Georgian military officer during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Later on, he allegedly turned into a useful source of intelligence for Georgian intelligence by identifying Russian spies and jihadists operating on domestic and foreign soil through a connection with Georgian intelligence agents. Khangoshvili continued to be considered a terrorist by Russian security service, the FSB and wanted in Russia. On 23 August 2019, Khangoshvili was assassinated in a Berlin park, by an alleged Russian GRU operative.
Life
Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was born on 15 August 1979 into the family of Sultan Khangoshvili, in the Duisi village of the Pankisi Gorge, a region of Georgia home to a large ethnic Chechen population known as the Kist. He finished school there and later went to work in Chechnya, the residence of his elder brother Zurab, in the late 1990s. In 2001, Khangoshvili joined the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in its fight against Russia during the Second Chechen War. Khangoshvili was a field commander and had close ties to former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov. Maskhadov was killed in a 2005 raid by the FSB, Russia's domestic intelligence agency. According to Khangoshvili's brother, Zurab, Zelimkhan participated in the June 2004 attack on security, military and police forces in Ingushetia and Dagestan, in which over 50 military personnel were killed; Zelimkhan himself was seriously wounded in the leg during the operation. Russian President Putin claimed that he was one of the perpetrators of the 2010 Moscow Metro bombings which left 40 people dead. After returning to his native Georgia, Khangoshvili commanded a Georgian anti-terror military unit in South Ossetia during the 2008 war, but his unit was never deployed. In 2016, Khangoshvili and his family, wife and four children, sought refuge in Germany after several attempts on his life in Georgia which his brother believes were orchestrated by Russian intelligence, although the accusation has been denied by the Russian authorities.
Assassination
On 23 August 2019, at around midday in the Kleiner Tiergarten park in Berlin Khangoshvili was walking through a wooded path of the park on his way back from the mosque he attended, when he was shot twice in the head by an alleged Russian assassin on a bike with a Glock 26 silencer. The gun and bicycle were afterwards dumped into the riverSpree, but the alleged perpetrator, identified as 49 year-old Russian national "Vadim Sokolov" by German police, was apprehended. The Russian state has been linked to the killing. The victim's body was later transported to his native village of Duisi in Georgia to be buried there on 29 August 2019.
Identifying Khangoshvili's assassin
Khangoshvili's alleged assassin, detained by German police, traveled on a valid Russian passport issued under the fake identity of Vadim Sokolov. Reporting by Der Spiegel and other media has disclosed that the suspect initially traveled from Moscow to Paris and then on to Warsaw, where he rented a hotel room for five days during which he traveled on to Berlin. In a report from 26 September 2019, The New York Times reported that German investigators had received a tip from an anonymous source claiming the suspect's real identity was that of Vladimir Stepanov, a former police officer from Saint Petersburg who in 2006 was convicted and sentenced to 24 years in jail. German police are said to be undetermined whether Vladimir Stepanov is in fact the person behind the Vadim Sokolov persona. The open source investigative team at Bellingcat and its investigative partners Der Spiegel, ' and the Dossier Centre, have concluded however that the suspect held by German police is unlikely to be Vladimir Stepanov. The same finding was reached independently by the St. Petersburg-based online newspaper', that claimed in a 26 September 2019 report that Vladimir Stepanov remains in a Russian prison. Bellingcat and its partners have stated that conclusive evidence proves that the suspect traveled to Berlin under a cover identity with the active support of the Russian state and that the Russian state "created a comprehensive, back-dated paper-trail for this fictitious persona in order to help him obtain the necessary travel and insurance documents, and crucially, a Schengen visa." "Sokolov's passport was issued without any biometric data, the inclusion of which has been the default option for all Russian passports since 2009, except 'in emergency situations when the applicant has no time to wait for the fingerprint encryption and printing process.' In fact, 20 GRU operatives outed by Bellingcat in recent years, including Skripal's hit team, have used these 'old-style' passports in ultimately futile attempts to hide their cover identities." On 4 Deсember 2019, German Public Prosecutor General took over the case, arguing that "there are sufficient real indications that the killing was either commissioned by state agencies of the Russian Federation or such agencies of the Autonomous Chechen Republic as part of the Russian Federation." On 6 December 2019, German media outlets reported that the German Federal Intelligence Service had received information that a Russian state agency plans to kill "Vadim Sokolov" in German prison to get rid of the witness. Perceiving it as credible, the German authorities transferred Stepanov to an unknown prison in Germany.
Diplomatic repercussions
On 4 December 2019, the German Federal Foreign Office accused Russia of refusing to cooperate in the investigation of Khangoshvili murder and expelled two Russian foreign office diplomatic employees working in Berlin. An official request for assistance in the case hadn't been put up until then; it was submitted to Russia two days after the expulsion. In response, Russia expelled two German diplomats on 12 December.
