Vladimir Putin likely ordered the assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal because he knew about sources of the Russian president’s illicit wealth, according to UK officials.
In 2018, Skripal and his daughter Yulia fell ill in Salisbury, UK, after being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in an attack the UK government blamed on Russia. Moscow denied any involvement.
The Skripals narrowly survived the poisoning. Police said that Dawn Sturgess and her partner Charlie Rowley in nearby Amesbury became ill after handling a perfume container with traces of Novichok. Sturgess survived while Rowley died.
Speaking at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry in London, Jonathan Allen, the director general of defense and intelligence at the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, said the order to poison Skripal and his daughter “would have gone to President Putin,” according to Politico.
Allen also told the inquiry that he took at “face value” Skripal’s claim that he was likely targeted because he knew about the Russian president’s sources of wealth, according to the Guardian.
Skripal, a former official with the Russian military intelligence agency the GRU, had reportedly told UK officials that he had information about Putin’s involvement in illegal activity regarding the disposal of rare metals and embezzlement of funds from aluminium sales.
“It makes sense that if he [Skripal] was working as a senior member of the GRU he would have access to secret information,” Allen said, according to the report.
“There have been numerous open-source works which link senior figures in the government, including the president, to control of natural resources, to control of the sources of Russian wealth and suggestions they profited from those,” he added.
Representatives for the Kremlin not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.
Skripal turned double agent in 1995 when he was recruited by the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
A Moscow military court said that he passed information to MI6 agents between 1995 and December 2004. It sentenced him to 13 years in prison for spying for Britain.
He was released in 2010 as part of a spy exchange between Russia and the US, and was granted asylum in the UK, where he lived in Salisbury under his real name.
His poisoning in 2018 sparked a diplomatic crisis, with the UK and 28 other countries expelling hundreds of Russian diplomats, and Russia responding by expelling British diplomats.
Putin’s wealth has long been the source of rumor, with reports stating that the Russian president owns vast palaces by the Black Sea and in northern Russia, luxury yachts, and expensive foreign properties.
The post Putin put a hit on a double agent because he knew the source of the Russian leader’s riches: UK intel appeared first on Business Insider.
