Bellingcat, the BBC and The Insider tracked the movements of agents on Nemtsov’s heels from the months before the shooting. Five Chechen men were convicted of murder.
Several Russian security service FSB agents were followed by an opposition politician Boris Nemtsovia before his assassination in 2015. The case is according to a joint study by the citizen journalist group Bellingcat, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s BBC and the Russian investigative journalism news site The Insider.
Nemtsov was killed in a shooting in Moscow in February 2015. According to Bellingcat, Nemtsov was previously overshadowed by the same FSB group that years later was followed by an opposition activist. Alexei Navalnyita before his poisoning in 2020. Navalnyi survived his assassination attempt and was later imprisoned after his return to Russia.
The investigation is based, among other things, on the travel data and telephone data of identified FSB agents available on the Russian Black Exchange. The same FSB assassination team has also been linked to an opposition politician in previous investigations Vladimir Kara-Murzan and the poisonings of author Dmytro Bukov.
Nemtsov, one of the top names in Russian politics in the 1990s, was the most prominent president Vladimir Putin critics of the regime, which opposed, among other things, the annexation of the Crimean peninsula. Nemtsov was once considered president Boris Yeltsin as a successor candidate.
Agents followed everywhere
Five Chechen men were convicted in Russia of Nemtsov’s murder. Nemtsov’s relatives saw the trial as a cover-up operation designed to protect the real planners of the murder. The motive for the murder or the perpetrator did not survive the trial.
According to Bellingcat, the evidence gathered shows that Nemtsov had been overshadowed by FSB agents long before the Chechen men convicted of the murder arrived in Moscow. The FSB team remained relentless on Nemtsov’s positions on all his trips to Russia from May 2014 to February 2015.
According to Bellingcat, the shading followed the same pattern as for poisoning victims. FSB agents usually arrived on the scene shortly before Nemtsov’s trip and left the area shortly after Nemtsov. Also noteworthy, according to Bellingcat, was the fact that the shading ended only days before the assassination.
However, during the investigation, FSB agents could not be directly linked to the murder itself, and their whereabouts were not known from the day of the murder. The assassination by shooting also differs clearly in its methods from the poisoning more typical of the FSB group.
Russian authorities have denied involvement in the poisoning or the murder of Nemtsov.