A 40-year-old Georgian man, identified as Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, was shot in the head while on his way to a mosque in Berlin on August 23, according to reports.
A week earlier, his suspected killer, using a Russian passport under the name of Vadim Sergeyevich Sokolov, flew from Moscow to Paris and then arrived in Warsaw three days later, Poland’s onet.pl news website reported on Monday.
He rented a hotel room in the centre of the Polish capital. His reservation was until August 26, but he left the hotel on August 22, onet.pl reported, citing German media outlets including the Tagesschau newspaper.
Investigators believe it was in Warsaw that the Russian obtained a Glock 26 pistol equipped with a silencer, the murder weapon with which he later shot Khangoshvili in Berlin, onet.pl reported.
The Polish website has previously reported that the August 23 murder in broad daylight in the German capital may have been motivated politically.
Onet.pl in the summer cited Georgia’s Human Rights Education and Monitoring Centre as saying that the slain Georgian fought in the Second Chechen War against Russian forces as a commander from 2001 to 2005.
According to onet.pl, the 49-year-old Russian suspect attempted to escape the crime scene in Berlin by bike after he fired a shot at Khangoshvili.
But police managed to capture the man, and they also found the murder weapon—a gun that he threw into the Spree River, which flows through central Berlin, onet.pl reported in August.
Germany has expelled two Russian embassy workers amid suspicion that Russia was behind the Berlin murder, the dw.com news website reported this month.
Moscow has denied any involvement, according to dw.com.
(gs/pk)
Source: onet.pl