MOSCOW: Residents in a small Russian village have identified one of the two suspects in the nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain as a senior intelligence agent, Russia’s respected Kommersant daily said on Thursday in a report that backed up findings by an investigative group.

British-based investigative group Bellingcat on Wednesday named one of the men suspected to have carried out the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter as Colonel Anatoly Chepiga, an agent with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU who was awarded Russia’s highest medal, Hero of Russia, in 2014.

The suspect had been named by British authorities as Ruslan Boshirov, and he had also appeared on Russian television channel RT under that name denying any involvement in the poison attack. The Bellingcat report published a photo from Chepiga’s 2003 passport that resembled Boshirov, but didn’t contain further proof that they are the same person.

Kommersant on Thursday interviewed several residents of Beryozovka, the small village where Chepiga’s family used to live, and quoted them confirming that Chepiga is one of the suspects identified by British authorities.

The villagers said they have not seen Chepiga for about ten years, but could recognise him in the photos released by British police and in the interview on RT. One resident described him as a “very good, clever boy”. Another said people in the village knew that Chepiga was “in the secret service” and that his mother was worried about his assignments.

Britain has charged Boshirov and another suspect, Alexander Petrov, with trying to kill Skripal and his daughter on March 4 with the Soviet-designed nerve agent Novichok in the English city of Salisbury. Britain has said the attack received approval “at a senior level of the Russian state,” an accusation Moscow has fiercely denied.

Both men appeared in an exclusive interview with the Kremlin-funded RT television station earlier this month, when they denied any role in the poisoning or links to the intelligence services. They said they were in the sports nutrition business and that they were in Salisbury on vacation.

Putin earlier this month said the two suspects are civilians who did nothing criminal.

Asked about Bellingcat’s report, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that the president stands by his statement. He added that the Kremlin doesn’t know who Chepiga was, but promised to check whether he received Russia’s highest award.

A local patriotic society briefly wrote about Anatoly Chepiga in a December article, saying he graduated in 2001 from the Far Eastern Military Command College. The article said he had been on assignment in Chechnya three times and has been awarded “Hero of Russia”.

Some Russian media on Thursday tried to debunk Bellingcat’s findings.

Russia’s best-selling news­­­paper Komsomolskaya Pravda on Thursday quoted a Defen­­­­ce Ministry employee who pointed to what he described as several discrepancies in the investigation.

Published in Dawn, September 28th, 2018