Salisbury suspects sought for Czech bombing

Two men charged with carrying out the Salisbury poisonings in 2018 have now been linked with a bombing in the Czech Republic. The central European country is expelling 18 Russian diplomats over suspicions that Russian intelligence service GRU was involved in an ammunition depot explosion in 2014 that killed two people. Police are searching for two suspects carrying Russian passports in connection with serious criminal activity in the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Those were the aliases used by two Russian military intelligence officers who British prosecutors charged with Russian spy Sergei Skripal’s attempted murder in Salisbury, England.

Foreign minister Dominic Raab said the UK stands in ‘full support’ of the Czech Republic. He tweeted: ‘The UK stands in full support of our Czech allies, who have exposed the lengths that the GRU will go to in their attempts to conduct dangerous and malign operations – and highlights a disturbing pattern of behaviour following the attack in Salisbury.’

In a briefing shown live on television, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said there was ‘well-grounded suspicion about the involvement of officers of the Russian intelligence service GRU… in the explosion of an ammunitions depot in the Vrbetice area.’

Several explosions shook the Vrbetice depot, 330 km (205 miles) southeast of Prague, in October 2014, killing two employees of a private company that was renting the site from a state military organisation. Babis called the circumstances ‘unprecedented and scandalous’, while a Russian politicians cited by Russian news agency Interfax described his allegation as absurd. Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent in March 2018. Both survived the attack. The attack prompted the biggest wave of diplomatic expulsions between Moscow and the West since the Cold War. Czech police said Petrov and Boshirov, whose whose birth names British government documents have given as Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepigas, had also used a Moldovan passport in the name of Nicolai Popa and a Tajik one issued in the name of Ruslan Tabarov. Police said both men were believed to have been in the Czech Republic from October 11 until October 16, 2014, the day of the explosion.

They were first in Prague and later in the eastern regions, which is where the depot is based. Russia would not extradite them, Interfax said, citing an unnamed source. Czech Republic is a NATO and EU member state, and the expulsions and allegations have triggered its biggest row with Russia since the end of the communist era in 1989. Russia could now consider closing the Czech Republic’s embassy in Moscow, a diplomatic source suggested. The US embassy in Prague said on Twitter that Washington ‘stands with its steadfast ally, the Czech Republic’.

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