[7] He was a field commander and had close ties to former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, who was killed in March 2005 in a raid by the Federal Security Service (FSB RF).
Khangoshvili's brother, Zurab, confirmed that Zelimkhan participated in the 2004 Nazran raid on security, military and police forces in the Russian Republic of Ingushetia that neighbours Chechnya.
Zelimkhan denied that he was ever responsible for war crimes, telling Georgian media, "The Russians are blaming me for many things, including terrorist attacks.
[9] On 23 August 2019, at around midday in the Kleiner Tiergarten park in Berlin, Khangoshvili was walking down a wooded path on his way back from the mosque he attended when he was shot three times—once in the shoulder and twice in the head—by a Russian assassin on a bicycle with a suppressed Glock 26.
[14] Khangoshvili's assassin, detained by German police, traveled on a valid Russian passport issued under the fake identity of Vadim Sokolov.
[citation needed] The Daily Beast noted that "20 GRU operatives outed by the independent investigative research network Bellingcat in recent years, including those suspected of poisoning the Skripals in England, had used these 'old-style' passports in ultimately futile attempts to hide their cover identities.
"[1] The research network Bellingcat and the investigative authorities concluded that Sokolov was actually Vadim Krasikov, born in August 1965 in the then Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.
This was justified by the fact that "there were sufficient factual indications that the killing of Tornike K. [Zelimkhan Khangoshvili's alias] was either commissioned by government agencies of Russia or those of the Chechen Republic as part of the Russian Federation.
On the same day, two members of the military intelligence service (GRU) in the Russian Embassy in Berlin were expelled from the country in connection with the investigation.
[citation needed] On 15 December 2021, a Berlin court found Krasikov guilty of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment without automatic parole.
He also added that "there had been an abuse of visas issued at the Slovak general consulate in St Petersburg, and in this connection a serious crime was committed on the territory of another EU and NATO member state".
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the murder a “grave breach of German law and the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany” and summoned Russia’s ambassador in Berlin to discuss the court’s conclusion.
[32] Family members of Paul Whelan, arrested in Russia in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges, have said that Whelan had initially been told that he had been arrested to be exchanged for a Russian prisoner in the United States, mentioning Konstantin Yaroshenko (who was later released in exchange for American Trevor Reed), Viktor Bout, or Roman Seleznev.
[citation needed] The rumours appeared to be confirmed when an Antonov-148 tail number RA-61727, which had been used to exchange Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner, landed at Kaliningrad airport on 31 July.