By pretending that a prominent Kremlin critic had been killed in Kyiv, Ukrainian intelligence says it wanted to expose a genuine Russian plot to murder the investigative journalist. But many questions remain unanswered.
Many reactions poured in from abroad, too, when Kyiv reported at the end of May that the Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko had been shot dead. One day later it was surprisingly revealed that the murder had been faked by the Ukrainian secret service SBU only to get to the people who had planned to actually carry out the murder. The authorities quickly spoke of a trail leading to Russia. Four months later, a key figure, a Kyiv businessman, was convicted of conspiring to commit murder. But the case remains opaque.
Contract murder for $30k
41-year-old Babchenko had made a name for himself as a war reporter and Kremlin critic, although some of his comments were received as tasteless in social networks. After a short stay in the EU, he lives in exile in Ukraine and works for a TV station.
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Little has been revealed about the plot to murder him. 50-year-old Boris German, who ran a factory for blank guns, was arrested as the organizer of the murder immediately after the public spectacle; he was previously unknown to the general public. German is said to have hired a friend of his, a former fighter against separatists in the East, to kill Babchenko for 30,000 US dollars (€26,000).
The assassin, for his part, informed the SBU secret service. According to media reports, German made a deal with the public prosecutor’s office and was sentenced to a relatively mild sentence of 4.5 years in prison at the end of August. The sentence has been final since the beginning of October
For more read the full of article at The Dw
