By Marion van der Kraats, dpa
Berlin (dpa) – A 56-year-old Russian national has been sentenced to life in prison for the contract killing of a Georgian man in a park in Berlin more than two years ago.
The court heard that the assassination had been carried out on behalf of Russian state authorities.
The killing took place on August 23, 2019, in the Kleiner Tiergarten park. Prosecutors say it was an act of retaliation for the Georgian’s participation in the second Chechen war and his “enmity towards the Russian state.”
The man who was killed was a 40-year-old Georgian of Chechen origin who had been living in Germany as an asylum seeker since the end of 2016 and had been classified as a Chechen terrorist by Russian authorities.
The court heard that the man convicted of the killing was an officer from the Russian domestic intelligence service, the FSB, who had travelled to Berlin using a fake identity in order to carry out the contract killing.
The defence had argued that the case was based on “highly questionable evidence.”
At the beginning of the trial, the accused gave his name through his lawyers – reported as Vadim S under German privacy laws – that he was 50 years old and a civil engineer. He denied having any connections to the Russian state.
The verdict is likely to further strain German-Russian relations. After the killing, the German government accused the Russian government of failing to cooperate in the investigation and expelled two employees of the Russian embassy in Berlin.
On Wednesday, the Russian ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechaev, criticized the Berlin court’s verdict.
“We consider this verdict not objective,” he told Russian state media in Moscow “It’s a politically motivated decision that further seriously strains the already not easy Russian-German relations.”
Russia has always denied the involvement of state agencies. However,in 2019 President Vladimir Putin described the Georgian who was killed as a “bandit, a murderer” whose extradition Moscow had repeatedly demanded from the German authorities without success.
German prosecutors said that Putin’s remarks indicated that the man was considered a terrorist “in the highest government circles.”
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