Archiwum zagraniczne East News 2023-09

Rex Features Ltd. do not claim any Copyright or License of the attached image Mandatory Credit: Photo by Shutterstock (10377553f) Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen living in Germany, who was assassinated in downtown Berlin on August 23 last year, while having lunch on the way to a mosque for Friday prayer. Vadim Krasikov, 55, who went under the alias Vadim Sokolov, is accused of killing 40-year-old Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin's Kleiner Tiergarten park on August 23 and goes on trial today in Germany. Khangoshvili, who fought against Russia during the second Chechen war in the early 2000s, was assassinated with three bullets, two of them fired at close range at his head. The killer, who was hiding in the nearby bushes, rushed toward the victim on an electric bike and shot the victim - once in the shoulder and twice in the head - using a 9mm Glock 26 with an attached silencer. After speeding away from the crime scene for a few hundred meters along the Spree river, the assassin stopped and jettisoned the electric bike, a plastic bag with the murder weapon, and a wig he was using, into the river. He was observed by two teenagers who alerted the police. The killer was then caught a few minutes later, just as he was disappearing into a crowd of tourists - now sporting a clean-shaven head, a mustachioed face, a pink t-shirt, and a touristy pouch holding his passport and some cash suspended from his neck. The arrested suspect was Vadim Krasikov, 55, who was carrying visa documents that identified him as Vadim Andreevich Sokolov, 49, born in Irkutsk, Siberia, and based in St Petersburg. He initially travelled by air from Moscow to Paris on a French-issued visa, before crossing into Germany six days before the murder. He denied any involvement in the murder. The victim was an ethnically Chechen Georgian citizen who had long been on the list of Moscow's declared enemies. Man arrested for murder of Chechan dissident - 02 Sep 2019