RUSSIA 🇷🇺 Thread: Wikileaks=FSB front, UKRAINE?, SNOWED LIED; NATO Aggression; Trump = Putins B!tch
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3@Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G @dtownreppin214
Another Russian oligarch confirmed assassinated
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3@Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G @dtownreppin214
Traitors gotta go.
Whole thing is insane 
From Russia With Blood
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G @dtownreppin214
From Russia With Blood
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G @dtownreppin214
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/16/politics/russian-mob-syria-chemical-weapons/index.html
Money stolen by Russian mob linked to man sanctioned for supporting Syria's chemical weapons program
By Michael Weiss, CNN Investigates
Updated 7:50 PM ET, Fri June 16, 2017
An investment group that U.S. authorities say is run by Russian mobsters and linked to the Russian government sent at least $900,000 to a company owned by a businessman tied to Syria's chemical weapons program, according to financial documents obtained by CNN.
According to a contract and bank records from late 2007 and early 2008, a company tied to a state-backed Russian mafia group, according to U.S. officials, agreed to pay more than $3 million to a company called Balec Trading Ventures, Ltd — supposedly for high-end "furniture."
Wire transaction records seen by CNN confirm that at least $900,000 was transferred.
Both businesses are registered in the British Virgin Islands.
The company allegedly tied to Russian mafia was called Quartell Trading Ltd., and the U.S. Department of Justice claims it is one of the many vehicles into which millions of dollars of stolen Russian taxpayer money was laundered a decade ago in connection with the so-called "Magnitsky affair," perhaps the most notorious corruption case in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Balec Ventures is owned by Issa al-Zeydi, a Russian whom the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned in 2014 for his connection to the Scientific Studies and Research Center, the hub of Syria's nonconventional weapons program, including its manufacture of Sarin and VX nerve agents and mustard gas.
The $230 million tax fraud
According to U.S. Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice, a band of Russian mafia called the Klyuev Group consists of past and present officials in the Russian Interior Ministry, two Moscow tax bureaus and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic intelligence service and successor body to the Soviet KGB.
In 2007, authorities say, the Klyuev Group, colluded to fraudulently seize the ownership of three subsidiary companies connected to a Moscow-based Hermitage Capital Management, then the largest hedge fund in Russia.
The Klyuev Group then fabricated hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for these companies that they had taken over. That enabled them to apply for a tax refund of $230 million.
The entire amount was processed in a single day, Christmas Eve 2007, by Russian tax officials on the Klyuev payroll.
Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer hired by Hermitage Capital to investigate the theft, uncovered this vast criminal conspiracy and the players behind it. He was arrested in 2008, denied urgent medical care for over a year in pretrial detention and physically tortured before his death in Moscow prison in 2009 at age 37.
In 2012, Congress passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, under which some three dozen Russian officials have been sanctioned.
The Kremlin rejects the U.S. version of events. Moscow insists that the lawyer died of "heart failure" and that he was the real tax cheat. A Russian court even put him on trial posthumously and found him guilty in 2013. It marked the first time in Russian history that a corpse was successfully prosecuted.
Follow the money — and dead bodies
Much of the $230 million from the Klyuev Group heist has since been located and frozen in jurisdictions all over the world. "Magnitsky stumbled into more than he realized, and more than we realized even after the passage of the Magnitsky Act," Daniel Fried, the former U.S. Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, told CNN.
The U.S. Attorney in New York charged Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-registered company owned by the son of an influential Russian official, with having purchased Manhattan real estate and opened U.S. bank accounts using some of the pilfered funds. That case was settled in May. In the settlement, Prevezon did not acknowledge any wrongdoing and the U.S. government agreed not to pursue the company in any further litigation tied to this case.
Another related asset forfeiture case is still ongoing in Switzerland where authorities have relied on evidence turned over by Alexander Perepilichny, a Russian expatriate who confessed to having been the principal money launderer for the Klyuev Group before he broke ties with it.
The evidence showed Credit Suisse bank accounts in Switzerland where some of the stolen money had been deposited. One of those Swiss accounts belonged to Quartell Trading, which is Perepilichny's company — or was before he dropped dead suddenly while jogging near his home in Surrey in November 2012.
At only 44 years-old and not known to have been in ill health, Perepilichny's death was initially declared "unexplained" by British police until traces of gelsemium, a poisonous flower, were discovered in his stomach.
A state coroner's inquest into the case began in Britain on June 5 and was upended when BuzzFeed reported a week later that the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the body that oversees all U.S. spy agencies, concluded with "high confidence" that Perepilichnyy was killed on orders by Vladimir Putin.
Citing more than a dozen past and present intelligence officials in the U.S., UK and France, BuzzFeed alleged that the British government was suppressing crucial evidence. BuzzFeed said that the British government refused to comment on the report.
More recently, in late March 2016, a lawyer for Magnitsky's family nearly died when he fell from the fourth floor of his apartment building, a day before he was due to submit new evidence to a Moscow court.
A dubious transaction
A signed contract dated December 18, 2007 — just days before the Klyuev Group's fraudulent $230 million refund was processed — show that Perepilichny's Quartell Trading agreed to buy $3,172,000 worth of high-end "furniture" from Balec Ventures, Issa al-Zeydi's company.
A copy of a SWIFT transaction also obtained by CNN show that $900,000 of that amount was wired from Quartell Trading to Balec a few weeks later, on January 25, 2008.
It is unclear whether any of the vaguely described items was ever delivered to the listed address, a warehouse in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Balec's bank, the Federal Bank of the Middle East (FBME), approved the transaction for filing five days later, on January 30, 2008. Notably, the bank also stamped the document "checked for money laundering purposes."
Less than a month later, according to the U.S. Justice Department, Quartell received nearly 2 million euro from a Latvian bank account that had received some of the stolen $230 million.
FBME, which was based in Tanzania, could not be reached for comment for this story. In May, the institution was shut down by Tanzania's central bank because of U.S. accusations that it was "used by its customers to facilitate money laundering, terrorist financing, transnational organized crime, fraud, sanctions evasions and other illicit activity internationally and through the US financial system," according to the US Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
There are oddities to Quartell-Balec transaction, according to financial analysts consulted by CNN who have examined the contract and supporting documents.
For one thing, Balec is described by FBME as being commercially engaged in the "buying/selling [of] promissory notes" and the import and export of building materials such as ceramic and marble tiles, timber, steel coils and "furnitures" [sic].
But it has no public profile or corporate website on which to showcase its inventory.
Ties to Assad's WMD?
The Syria-born Issa al-Zeydi does not have a conspicuous public profile in Russia, apart from a largely inactive social media page on VKontake, the Russian version of Facebook, which CNN has confirmed belongs to the man who owns Balec Ventures.
He graduated in 1964 from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, where he studied engineering.
According to corporate registration records in Russia, al-Zeydi is also the owner and/or CEO of several small companies with next to no capital.
One of these, Aldzhamal Interneshal, claims to work in "non-specialized wholesale trade," "the production of petroleum products" and the "manufacture of industrial gases."
He was also the director of Enterprises Ltd. and Fruminenti Investments Ltd., two companies that the U.S. sanctioned in 2014 for their connection to the Scientific Studies and Research Center, Syria's government agency responsible for developing and producing non-conventional weapons and ballistic missiles," according to the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
It is unclear if any of the $900,000 that Quartell wired to Balec went to support the Center.
Following the sarin attack in Syria in April, which prompted President Donald Trump to authorize US airstrikes against a Syrian airbase, the Treasury Department further sanctioned 271 employees of the Scientific Studies and Research Center, describing it as "one of the largest sanctions actions in its history."
Repeated attempts to contact Issa al-Zeydi in Moscow for this story, using the registered addresses of his Russian-based companies and phone numbers, proved unsuccessful.
Additional reporting by Tim Lister and Mary Ilyushina in Moscow.
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3@Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22@Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G @dtownreppin214
Money stolen by Russian mob linked to man sanctioned for supporting Syria's chemical weapons program
By Michael Weiss, CNN Investigates
Updated 7:50 PM ET, Fri June 16, 2017
An investment group that U.S. authorities say is run by Russian mobsters and linked to the Russian government sent at least $900,000 to a company owned by a businessman tied to Syria's chemical weapons program, according to financial documents obtained by CNN.
According to a contract and bank records from late 2007 and early 2008, a company tied to a state-backed Russian mafia group, according to U.S. officials, agreed to pay more than $3 million to a company called Balec Trading Ventures, Ltd — supposedly for high-end "furniture."
Wire transaction records seen by CNN confirm that at least $900,000 was transferred.
Both businesses are registered in the British Virgin Islands.
The company allegedly tied to Russian mafia was called Quartell Trading Ltd., and the U.S. Department of Justice claims it is one of the many vehicles into which millions of dollars of stolen Russian taxpayer money was laundered a decade ago in connection with the so-called "Magnitsky affair," perhaps the most notorious corruption case in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Balec Ventures is owned by Issa al-Zeydi, a Russian whom the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned in 2014 for his connection to the Scientific Studies and Research Center, the hub of Syria's nonconventional weapons program, including its manufacture of Sarin and VX nerve agents and mustard gas.
The $230 million tax fraud
According to U.S. Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice, a band of Russian mafia called the Klyuev Group consists of past and present officials in the Russian Interior Ministry, two Moscow tax bureaus and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic intelligence service and successor body to the Soviet KGB.
In 2007, authorities say, the Klyuev Group, colluded to fraudulently seize the ownership of three subsidiary companies connected to a Moscow-based Hermitage Capital Management, then the largest hedge fund in Russia.
The Klyuev Group then fabricated hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for these companies that they had taken over. That enabled them to apply for a tax refund of $230 million.
The entire amount was processed in a single day, Christmas Eve 2007, by Russian tax officials on the Klyuev payroll.
Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer hired by Hermitage Capital to investigate the theft, uncovered this vast criminal conspiracy and the players behind it. He was arrested in 2008, denied urgent medical care for over a year in pretrial detention and physically tortured before his death in Moscow prison in 2009 at age 37.
In 2012, Congress passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, under which some three dozen Russian officials have been sanctioned.
The Kremlin rejects the U.S. version of events. Moscow insists that the lawyer died of "heart failure" and that he was the real tax cheat. A Russian court even put him on trial posthumously and found him guilty in 2013. It marked the first time in Russian history that a corpse was successfully prosecuted.
Follow the money — and dead bodies
Much of the $230 million from the Klyuev Group heist has since been located and frozen in jurisdictions all over the world. "Magnitsky stumbled into more than he realized, and more than we realized even after the passage of the Magnitsky Act," Daniel Fried, the former U.S. Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, told CNN.
The U.S. Attorney in New York charged Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-registered company owned by the son of an influential Russian official, with having purchased Manhattan real estate and opened U.S. bank accounts using some of the pilfered funds. That case was settled in May. In the settlement, Prevezon did not acknowledge any wrongdoing and the U.S. government agreed not to pursue the company in any further litigation tied to this case.
Another related asset forfeiture case is still ongoing in Switzerland where authorities have relied on evidence turned over by Alexander Perepilichny, a Russian expatriate who confessed to having been the principal money launderer for the Klyuev Group before he broke ties with it.
The evidence showed Credit Suisse bank accounts in Switzerland where some of the stolen money had been deposited. One of those Swiss accounts belonged to Quartell Trading, which is Perepilichny's company — or was before he dropped dead suddenly while jogging near his home in Surrey in November 2012.
At only 44 years-old and not known to have been in ill health, Perepilichny's death was initially declared "unexplained" by British police until traces of gelsemium, a poisonous flower, were discovered in his stomach.
A state coroner's inquest into the case began in Britain on June 5 and was upended when BuzzFeed reported a week later that the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the body that oversees all U.S. spy agencies, concluded with "high confidence" that Perepilichnyy was killed on orders by Vladimir Putin.
Citing more than a dozen past and present intelligence officials in the U.S., UK and France, BuzzFeed alleged that the British government was suppressing crucial evidence. BuzzFeed said that the British government refused to comment on the report.
More recently, in late March 2016, a lawyer for Magnitsky's family nearly died when he fell from the fourth floor of his apartment building, a day before he was due to submit new evidence to a Moscow court.
A dubious transaction
A signed contract dated December 18, 2007 — just days before the Klyuev Group's fraudulent $230 million refund was processed — show that Perepilichny's Quartell Trading agreed to buy $3,172,000 worth of high-end "furniture" from Balec Ventures, Issa al-Zeydi's company.
A copy of a SWIFT transaction also obtained by CNN show that $900,000 of that amount was wired from Quartell Trading to Balec a few weeks later, on January 25, 2008.
It is unclear whether any of the vaguely described items was ever delivered to the listed address, a warehouse in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Balec's bank, the Federal Bank of the Middle East (FBME), approved the transaction for filing five days later, on January 30, 2008. Notably, the bank also stamped the document "checked for money laundering purposes."
Less than a month later, according to the U.S. Justice Department, Quartell received nearly 2 million euro from a Latvian bank account that had received some of the stolen $230 million.
FBME, which was based in Tanzania, could not be reached for comment for this story. In May, the institution was shut down by Tanzania's central bank because of U.S. accusations that it was "used by its customers to facilitate money laundering, terrorist financing, transnational organized crime, fraud, sanctions evasions and other illicit activity internationally and through the US financial system," according to the US Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
There are oddities to Quartell-Balec transaction, according to financial analysts consulted by CNN who have examined the contract and supporting documents.
For one thing, Balec is described by FBME as being commercially engaged in the "buying/selling [of] promissory notes" and the import and export of building materials such as ceramic and marble tiles, timber, steel coils and "furnitures" [sic].
But it has no public profile or corporate website on which to showcase its inventory.
Ties to Assad's WMD?
The Syria-born Issa al-Zeydi does not have a conspicuous public profile in Russia, apart from a largely inactive social media page on VKontake, the Russian version of Facebook, which CNN has confirmed belongs to the man who owns Balec Ventures.
He graduated in 1964 from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, where he studied engineering.
According to corporate registration records in Russia, al-Zeydi is also the owner and/or CEO of several small companies with next to no capital.
One of these, Aldzhamal Interneshal, claims to work in "non-specialized wholesale trade," "the production of petroleum products" and the "manufacture of industrial gases."
He was also the director of Enterprises Ltd. and Fruminenti Investments Ltd., two companies that the U.S. sanctioned in 2014 for their connection to the Scientific Studies and Research Center, Syria's government agency responsible for developing and producing non-conventional weapons and ballistic missiles," according to the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
It is unclear if any of the $900,000 that Quartell wired to Balec went to support the Center.
Following the sarin attack in Syria in April, which prompted President Donald Trump to authorize US airstrikes against a Syrian airbase, the Treasury Department further sanctioned 271 employees of the Scientific Studies and Research Center, describing it as "one of the largest sanctions actions in its history."
Repeated attempts to contact Issa al-Zeydi in Moscow for this story, using the registered addresses of his Russian-based companies and phone numbers, proved unsuccessful.
Additional reporting by Tim Lister and Mary Ilyushina in Moscow.
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3@Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22@Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G @dtownreppin214
The Man Who Knew Too Much
The Man Who Knew Too Much
His nuclear research helped a judge determine that former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko had been assassinated – likely on Putin’s orders. Just months after the verdict, the scientist himself was found stabbed to death with two knives. Police deemed it a suicide, but US intelligence officials suspect it was murder.
June 19, 2017, at 1:16 p.m.
When police entered the red brick house in Oxfordshire, they found the body of a stocky, bushy-haired scientist sprawled across the kitchen floor. Blood from severe wounds in his neck, arms, and stomach pooled around him. A large kitchen knife lay in his lifeless hand, and a second smaller blade was in the kitchen sink.
The murder detective who attended the scene would tell his inquest that she was shocked to witness injuries that were “so extensive”. Still, the police and coroner declared it a suicide – concluding that Dr Matthew Puncher had somehow managed to stab and slash himself repeatedly with two separate knives before succumbing to his wounds. Suicide by stabbing is rare – and cases with multiple wounds are exceedingly so. But this case was still more unusual.
Puncher, a renowned government radiation scientist, had played a key role in uncovering one of the most shocking assassinations in a century: the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a defector from the Russian security services in London. Puncher was part of a team of scientists whose research discovered a vital clue that helped a British inquiry conclude Litvinenko’s murder was likely ordered by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Police were quick to close the case on Puncher's death, determining that there were no grounds for suspicion, despite his role in that international controversy and research trips he subsequently made to Russia on behalf of the British and American governments.
Now, BuzzFeed News can reveal that Puncher is among at least 14 people US intelligence officials suspect were killed in the UK by Russian mafia groups or secret services, two forces that sometimes work together, since Putin’s rise to power. Four American intelligence officials said US spies have gathered intelligence about the scientist’s death and believe that he “was assassinated”. They said they have passed MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, information connecting Puncher’s death – and 13 others – to Russia. Yet the British police have ruled out suspicions in all those cases and shut down any further investigation.
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Russian assassins are being allowed to operate in Britain with impunity, 17 current and former high-ranking intelligence officials on both sides of the Atlantic told BuzzFeed News. Litvinenko’s assassination was a blatant act of provocation that could not be ignored. But many other less glaring cases have gone unpunished, sources said, out of a desire to avoid antagonising Russia and to protect the flow of Russian money into British banks and properties.
Last week we revealed that US spy agencies had handed the British government high-grade intelligence that the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichnyy, who died in Surrey in 2012, was likely assassinated on the direct orders of the Kremlin – but the authorities sidelined that and other evidence pointing to murder, instead declaring that he had died of natural causes. Then we exposed intelligence connecting the Russian state or mafia to the deaths of nine more men in the UK, including the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky and his British fixer Scot Young, that were all deemed unsuspicious by the British police.
Today, as we reveal fresh evidence in the Puncher case, we can also disclose US intelligence connecting two further deaths in Britain to the assassination of Litvinenko:
- The Russian diplomat Igor Ponomarev died in London two days before Litvinenko was poisoned – and on the eve of a planned meeting with Mario Scaramella, a key associate of the defector who was investigating corrupt activities by the Russian secret services in Italy. Ponomarev complained of extreme thirst and reportedly downed three litres of water just before keeling over after a trip to the opera, raising suspicions that he, too, had been poisoned – but his body was reportedly whisked back to Russia before a postmortem could be performed. Four high-ranking intelligence sources told BuzzFeed News that US spy agencies have information suggesting he was assassinated.
- Daniel McGrory – a journalist for The Times who reported extensively on Litvinenko’s death – died five days before the airing of a documentary about the case in which he was interviewed. McGrory’s family firmly believe he died of natural causes, telling BuzzFeed News an autopsy found he had a brain haemorrhage due to an enlarged heart. But now the four American intelligence sources have told BuzzFeed News that British intelligence officials are so concerned about Russia-sanctioned killings that they have taken a harder look, asking US spy agencies for information about McGrory's death “in the context of assassinations”. A second contributor to the documentary, the US security consultant Paul Joyal, was shot outside his home shortly after it aired by two unknown assailants, and only narrowly survived.
Supplied/BuzzFeed News
A young Dr Matthew Puncher.
A former senior counter-terror officer for Scotland Yard, the UK’s premier police force, told BuzzFeed News Puncher’s death should have been investigated as a potential assassination. A suicide by multiple knife wounds, he said, “is very unusual”. Puncher’s trips to Russia before his death should be “properly investigated”, he continued, especially given the scientist’s role in in the Litvinenko investigation. He said he was “alarmed” that the case had rested with local police officers in Thames Valley “because they wouldn’t have the ability to follow through the international links” and said it should have been escalated to the elite team of counter-terror officers who investigated Litvinenko’s killing. Thames Valley police said they have “received no new evidence regarding this investigation since the inquest was held".
Prime minister Theresa May is now facing mounting pressure to explain her role in concealing evidence relating to Russian assassinations in Britain. In her six years as home secretary, she spearheaded the British government’s response to national security threats, and she personally intervened to delay the public inquiry into Litvinenko’s death, citing the need to protect “international relations” with Russia. The British government declined to comment on Puncher's case or the other 13 deaths, citing national security concerns. But a spokesperson said in a statement: “The UK Government takes seriously its obligation to protect people in the UK from hostile state activity – including assassinations.”
Today, we reveal the story of a man who knew too much about one of Russia's most notorious assassinations – and the British authorities who looked the other way when he met his brutal end.
As Alexander Litvinenko faded fast in a London hospital in November 2006 – losing his hair, shedding weight, and turning yellow from jaundice as his organs failed – the spy turned passionate Kremlin critic insisted that he had been poisoned by Russian agents acting on Putin’s orders. But doctors were flummoxed: Though his symptoms suggested radiation sickness, their Geiger counters detected no evidence of the gamma rays commonly associated with radioactive materials.
Then, after extensive tests, a team of government scientists struck upon a seismic discovery: Litvinenko had been given a fatal dose of polonium 210 – a rare nuclear isotope that emits alpha rather than gamma rays and is therefore undetectable by regular radiation checks. The discovery of the polonium in the defector’s system came three weeks after he had first fallen ill. The following morning, he was dead.
It fell to the affable and unassuming Puncher, a scientist at the government’s Health Protection Agency who had spent a decade studying the effects of radiation on the human body, to measure the precise amount of polonium in the dead man’s system. The level of radioactive contamination he discovered was off the scale. “This is an unprecedented event in the UK,” the HPA said in a public statement. “It is the first time someone in the UK has apparently been deliberately poisoned with a radioactive agent.”
The discovery put the Kremlin squarely in the frame. Russia, which keeps polonium under rigorous state control, is the only country in the world that produces the radioactive chemical in the amounts used to kill Litvinenko. On the eve of his death, Litvinenko himself had released a statement accusing the Russian president, warning that “the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life”. That message, and a harrowing image of the emaciated, hairless defector on his deathbed, had been beamed around the globe.
Getty
Alexander Litvinenko on his deathbed.
Now that the scientists had identified polonium’s unusual alpha rays, detectives from Scotland Yard’s elite counter-terror force were able to discover a radioactive trail all over London left behind by the two men Litvinenko had accused of his murder. Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun had contaminated almost everything they touched since arriving on a British Airways flight from Russia: Traces of polonium were found in their hotel rooms, the restaurants and strip club they had visited, and the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel where they had slipped the poison into Litvinenko’s tea.
The evidence was so blatant that authorities had no option but to take action. The Crown Prosecution Service charged Lugovoy and Kovtun, both of whom denied any role in the killing, with murder. But the Russian government refused to extradite the two assassins, and diplomatic relations between the two countries all but ground to a halt, with both sides expelling diplomats. Without access to the two prime suspects, the police investigation stalled too.
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It took almost 10 years for the government to relent to demands for a full public inquiry into Litvinenko’s killing, after the official inquest into his cause of death stalled because it lacked powers to hear top secret evidence from MI6. Theresa May explained in a 2013 letter to the coroner that “international relations have been a factor in the Government’s decision-making” not to establish an inquiry empowered to review classified material. But then, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea sparked international condemnation, the position changed.
Sir Robert Owen heard testimony for almost a year, much of it held behind closed doors, and in January 2016 his inquiry delivered an explosive verdict. Lugovoy and Kovtun had killed Litvinenko in an FSB operation that was “probably approved”, the judge said, “by President Putin”.
The Kremlin dismissed the verdict as a “blatant provocation” by the British government. One Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the case had been “politicised” and “darkened the general atmosphere of our bilateral relations”. Lugovoy, who was now a member of the Russian parliament and had been awarded a medal for “services to the motherland” by Putin during the inquiry, dismissed the verdict as “a pathetic attempt by London to use a ‘skeleton in the cupboard’ to support their political ambitions”. A variety of unnamed government sources were quoted by Kremlin-controlled media outlets warning of “serious consequences” for Britain.
And, at that very moment, Puncher was hard at work on another project that would bring him directly into the sights of the Russian state. In the weeks directly before and after the verdict, his work would take him to Russia to study the effects of radiation at the Mayak nuclear site – the state facility that was the very source of the polonium used to kill Litvinenko. Soon he too would be dead.
The Mayak nuclear facility is a place so secretive that until recently it was not even on the map. Buried deep in the forests of Russia’s Ural mountains, and surrounded by a 250km exclusion zone, it is home to the country’s most closely guarded nuclear secrets. This was the birthplace of the Soviet atomic bomb project, and the site of a series of devastating nuclear disasters that were covered up for decades until the fall of the USSR. It is one of the most contaminated places on the planet – known by some as “the graveyard of the earth”.
When Puncher travelled to Russia in the final weeks of Litvinenko inquiry, he was there on behalf of the US government. He had been placed in charge of a sensitive assignment – codenamed Project 2.4 – to measure the effects on workers of radiation from the plutonium produced at the Mayak facility. Nuclear spills had caused widespread sickness, mutations, cancer, and radiation poisoning among nearby residents, and the facility had accepted US help in improving safety at the site.
Puncher’s assignment was part of a US federal contract given to Public Health England, the government agency that succeeded the HPA to guard the British public from health hazards including chemical and nuclear exposure. Under the US research contract, Puncher and his team were tasked with working on software programs designed to measure the risks of radiation exposure at Mayak.
Project 2.4 had taken Puncher to Russia a number of times – and as he and his colleagues went about their work, they noticed something disquieting. They were being “followed and bugged”, Dr Alan Birchall told BuzzFeed News, “definitely by the FSB” and, they suspected, also by British spies. “It wasn’t a happy project to work on,” said Birchall, a long-time scientist who accompanied Puncher on several trips to Russia and knew him well.
On one of those trips, just before Christmas 2015, something happened that left Puncher a haunted man. When he returned, his disposition had “changed completely”, his wife would later tell the inquest into his cause of death. A man who had loved doing homework with his children and cooking at home, who generally had a positive attitude, suddenly “just lost interest”, she testified. “I had to prompt him to do things like getting dressed and washing up, things he did without thinking before.” Kathryn Puncher declined to speak to BuzzFeed News.
Nevertheless, Puncher summoned the energy to return to Russia in February for what was to be his final trip. The translator who accompanied him, Olga Lazareva, told BuzzFeed News that his work went well and she “didn’t see any worrying signs”.
But when he came home, the 46-year-old was in a state of acute distress – telling his family and colleagues that he had made a serious mathematical “mistake” on Project 2.4 that was so bad he was worried he might end up in prison.
His coworkers were baffled. Several told BuzzFeed News that the “coding error” Puncher felt he had made in his secret research was really no big deal, and that he had simply taken “another route” to get the same answer in calculating the effects of the plutonium on local residents. Public Health England said it received no indication that his abilities were in question. His colleague George Etherington told the inquest he had assured Puncher his fears of prosecution were “groundless” and that “he would look back and wonder why he worried so much.” But he said Puncher remained inexplicably inconsolable.
Puncher was so distressed about these mistakes that his mother, Janet, had felt compelled to ask him: “Could someone die?” She later told the police that her son had reassured her there was no risk of that happening.
But soon afterwards Puncher was found dead on his kitchen floor.
The web of death
FSBThe KremlinRussian mafiaStephen MossStephen CurtisIgor PonomarevAlexander LitvinenkoYuri GolubevDaniel McGroryBadri PatarkatsishviliPaul CastleAlexander PerepilichnyyRobbie CurtisBoris BerezovskyJohnny ElichaoffScot YoungMatthew Puncher200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017
Chris Applegate and Tim Lane / BuzzFeed News
Click on the images to learn more about each death
To Detective Constable Rachel Carter, who inspected the kitchen, the whole scene was “very unusual”. There no sign of a struggle: None of the furniture had been knocked over, and all the blood belonged to Puncher. And yet “his injuries were so extensive”, and there was so much blood, that she struggled to believe he had turned two knives upon himself. “It caused me some unease initially,” she testified at his inquest. “I didn’t know how he could have inflicted all those injuries on himself without losing consciousness.”
But the police took evidence from Puncher’s wife Kathryn, who told them her husband had become so crippled with anxiety about his work that he had tried to hang himself with a computer cable the the week before his body was found. Officers determined that Puncher must have managed to stab himself to death, and closed the case.
The Home Office pathologist Dr Nicholas Hunt testified that though he could not “entirely exclude” murder, it was possible for Puncher to have knifed himself that many times and still remain conscious. He noted that the scientist “had small wounds to his hands and such injuries may be seen in the context of defensive actions in a third party assault with a blade", but he said it was also possible that they were sustained when the knife became “wetted with blood” and slipped in his hands.
Carter testified that, despite her early doubts, she was ultimately “satisfied’ that it was a suicide. “All the information told us he was very depressed and no-one in his family seemed particularly surprised he had taken his own life,” she said. The coroner, Nicholas Graham, delivered a verdict of suicide.
BuzzFeed News has now spoken with eight relatives and friends of Puncher who all said they were astonished by the suggestion that he was suicidal – but were never interviewed by police. Each said that Puncher had no known history of depression and that his change in disposition after the Russia trip came as a shock, especially for someone known to them as consistently calm and rational. Members of his family said that they only learned of the depression and previous suicide attempt after he died.
Relatives said Thames Valley police had never interviewed the scientist’s son, Sam Puncher, or either of his two brothers, Ben and Seb. Statements were only taken, they said, from Puncher’s parents and wife Kathryn. Sam could not believe that his father had committed suicide, according to his mother, Puncher’s first wife. “He just said straight away: ‘How could my dad do that?’” she said. “‘How could he not say goodbye to me? I don’t understand.’”
“I didn’t know how he could have inflicted all those injuries on himself without losing consciousness”
Many of Puncher’s relatives were unwilling to be named in the context of his death, but a source close to the family said they were baffled that he had been sent back to Russia in the direct aftermath of the public inquiry that had accused Putin of ordering an assassination. “I would be highly critical of sending somebody who had been investigating Litvinenko on a trip to Moscow,” the source told BuzzFeed News.
Dr Phil Blower, a long-time friend of Puncher’s, also wants answers. “It’s very weird that he goes off to Russia then he comes back and is suddenly depressed and irrational,” he said. “I think there are definitely still questions to be asked, and I’m astonished that none of this is being investigated by anyone serious.”
A spokesperson for Public Health England said the “verdict of the Coroner was clear” that Puncher committed suicide, and the agency's “thoughts remain with Dr Puncher’s family".
But the former senior Scotland Yard counter-terror officer who spoke to BuzzFeed News said Puncher’s sudden change of mood should not have been enough to persuade police to rule out foul play in his death. “The state can mess up minds, it can do all sorts of things. It has research laboratories, it has science facilities,” he said. “There are all sorts of drugs that can be given to people to create depression.” He said the proximity of Puncher’s changes of mood to his trips to Russia was potentially “very serious” and should be investigated fully. And he said the local Thames Valley police were in no way equipped to carry out the task. It should, he said, have been taken over by Scotland Yard’s counter-terror team – who have the security clearance needed to communicate with Britain’s spy agencies in case they have any intelligence that might be relevant to solving a case.
Behind the scenes, even as the police investigation was being shut down, BuzzFeed News has learned from four intelligence officials that US spy agencies were providing Britain’s secret intelligence service with information connecting Puncher’s death to Russia. The officials told BuzzFeed News that one factor they take into consideration when assessing whether suspicious deaths can be connected to the Kremlin is: “Could Russia be driving these people to suicide?” But in Puncher’s case, they said their assessment was that he had likely been assassinated. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment on intelligence matters.
In a bizarre twist, after the suicide verdict there was one entity still eager to connect Puncher’s death to the Litvinenko inquiry: the Russian government. Channel One, a state-controlled Russian television outlet, aired a segment calling it a “very strange suicide” and asked, “What was Matthew Puncher afraid of?”
The presenter raised the question: “Could he have made a mistake in the case of Litvinenko?", adding that "according to the British authorities, this question is not relevant”.
US spies watch such pronouncements from Kremlin-controlled media outlets closely. “When Russia kills people they do it to send a message,” one high-ranking official said: “Don’t cross Putin."
In our next story, BuzzFeed News will reveal the last of the 14 deaths US intelligence officials believe is linked to Russia.
Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com. To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in LA. Recipient: IRE 2016 FOI award; Newseum Institute National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame. PGP fingerprint 46DB 0712 284B 8C6E 40FF 7A1B D3CD 5720 694B 16F0. Contact this reporter at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com
Contact Jason Leopold at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com.
Tom Warren is an investigations correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in London.
Contact Tom Warren at tom.warren@buzzfeed.com.
Alex Campbell is the deputy UK investigations editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in London. His secure PGP fingerprint is 0712 96AD 2FED CEF9 AFA7 9280 0397 E646 0A39 2C8A
Contact Alex Campbell at alex.campbell@buzzfeed.com.
Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
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It took almost 10 years for the government to relent to demands for a full public inquiry into Litvinenko’s killing, after the official inquest into his cause of death stalled because it lacked powers to hear top secret evidence from MI6. Theresa May explained in a 2013 letter to the coroner that “international relations have been a factor in the Government’s decision-making” not to establish an inquiry empowered to review classified material. But then, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea sparked international condemnation, the position changed.
Sir Robert Owen heard testimony for almost a year, much of it held behind closed doors, and in January 2016 his inquiry delivered an explosive verdict. Lugovoy and Kovtun had killed Litvinenko in an FSB operation that was “probably approved”, the judge said, “by President Putin”.
The Kremlin dismissed the verdict as a “blatant provocation” by the British government. One Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the case had been “politicised” and “darkened the general atmosphere of our bilateral relations”. Lugovoy, who was now a member of the Russian parliament and had been awarded a medal for “services to the motherland” by Putin during the inquiry, dismissed the verdict as “a pathetic attempt by London to use a ‘skeleton in the cupboard’ to support their political ambitions”. A variety of unnamed government sources were quoted by Kremlin-controlled media outlets warning of “serious consequences” for Britain.
And, at that very moment, Puncher was hard at work on another project that would bring him directly into the sights of the Russian state. In the weeks directly before and after the verdict, his work would take him to Russia to study the effects of radiation at the Mayak nuclear site – the state facility that was the very source of the polonium used to kill Litvinenko. Soon he too would be dead.
The Mayak nuclear facility is a place so secretive that until recently it was not even on the map. Buried deep in the forests of Russia’s Ural mountains, and surrounded by a 250km exclusion zone, it is home to the country’s most closely guarded nuclear secrets. This was the birthplace of the Soviet atomic bomb project, and the site of a series of devastating nuclear disasters that were covered up for decades until the fall of the USSR. It is one of the most contaminated places on the planet – known by some as “the graveyard of the earth”.
When Puncher travelled to Russia in the final weeks of Litvinenko inquiry, he was there on behalf of the US government. He had been placed in charge of a sensitive assignment – codenamed Project 2.4 – to measure the effects on workers of radiation from the plutonium produced at the Mayak facility. Nuclear spills had caused widespread sickness, mutations, cancer, and radiation poisoning among nearby residents, and the facility had accepted US help in improving safety at the site.
Puncher’s assignment was part of a US federal contract given to Public Health England, the government agency that succeeded the HPA to guard the British public from health hazards including chemical and nuclear exposure. Under the US research contract, Puncher and his team were tasked with working on software programs designed to measure the risks of radiation exposure at Mayak.
Project 2.4 had taken Puncher to Russia a number of times – and as he and his colleagues went about their work, they noticed something disquieting. They were being “followed and bugged”, Dr Alan Birchall told BuzzFeed News, “definitely by the FSB” and, they suspected, also by British spies. “It wasn’t a happy project to work on,” said Birchall, a long-time scientist who accompanied Puncher on several trips to Russia and knew him well.
On one of those trips, just before Christmas 2015, something happened that left Puncher a haunted man. When he returned, his disposition had “changed completely”, his wife would later tell the inquest into his cause of death. A man who had loved doing homework with his children and cooking at home, who generally had a positive attitude, suddenly “just lost interest”, she testified. “I had to prompt him to do things like getting dressed and washing up, things he did without thinking before.” Kathryn Puncher declined to speak to BuzzFeed News.
Nevertheless, Puncher summoned the energy to return to Russia in February for what was to be his final trip. The translator who accompanied him, Olga Lazareva, told BuzzFeed News that his work went well and she “didn’t see any worrying signs”.
But when he came home, the 46-year-old was in a state of acute distress – telling his family and colleagues that he had made a serious mathematical “mistake” on Project 2.4 that was so bad he was worried he might end up in prison.
His coworkers were baffled. Several told BuzzFeed News that the “coding error” Puncher felt he had made in his secret research was really no big deal, and that he had simply taken “another route” to get the same answer in calculating the effects of the plutonium on local residents. Public Health England said it received no indication that his abilities were in question. His colleague George Etherington told the inquest he had assured Puncher his fears of prosecution were “groundless” and that “he would look back and wonder why he worried so much.” But he said Puncher remained inexplicably inconsolable.
Puncher was so distressed about these mistakes that his mother, Janet, had felt compelled to ask him: “Could someone die?” She later told the police that her son had reassured her there was no risk of that happening.
But soon afterwards Puncher was found dead on his kitchen floor.
The web of death
FSBThe KremlinRussian mafiaStephen MossStephen CurtisIgor PonomarevAlexander LitvinenkoYuri GolubevDaniel McGroryBadri PatarkatsishviliPaul CastleAlexander PerepilichnyyRobbie CurtisBoris BerezovskyJohnny ElichaoffScot YoungMatthew Puncher200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017
Chris Applegate and Tim Lane / BuzzFeed News
Click on the images to learn more about each death
To Detective Constable Rachel Carter, who inspected the kitchen, the whole scene was “very unusual”. There no sign of a struggle: None of the furniture had been knocked over, and all the blood belonged to Puncher. And yet “his injuries were so extensive”, and there was so much blood, that she struggled to believe he had turned two knives upon himself. “It caused me some unease initially,” she testified at his inquest. “I didn’t know how he could have inflicted all those injuries on himself without losing consciousness.”
But the police took evidence from Puncher’s wife Kathryn, who told them her husband had become so crippled with anxiety about his work that he had tried to hang himself with a computer cable the the week before his body was found. Officers determined that Puncher must have managed to stab himself to death, and closed the case.
The Home Office pathologist Dr Nicholas Hunt testified that though he could not “entirely exclude” murder, it was possible for Puncher to have knifed himself that many times and still remain conscious. He noted that the scientist “had small wounds to his hands and such injuries may be seen in the context of defensive actions in a third party assault with a blade", but he said it was also possible that they were sustained when the knife became “wetted with blood” and slipped in his hands.
Carter testified that, despite her early doubts, she was ultimately “satisfied’ that it was a suicide. “All the information told us he was very depressed and no-one in his family seemed particularly surprised he had taken his own life,” she said. The coroner, Nicholas Graham, delivered a verdict of suicide.
BuzzFeed News has now spoken with eight relatives and friends of Puncher who all said they were astonished by the suggestion that he was suicidal – but were never interviewed by police. Each said that Puncher had no known history of depression and that his change in disposition after the Russia trip came as a shock, especially for someone known to them as consistently calm and rational. Members of his family said that they only learned of the depression and previous suicide attempt after he died.
Relatives said Thames Valley police had never interviewed the scientist’s son, Sam Puncher, or either of his two brothers, Ben and Seb. Statements were only taken, they said, from Puncher’s parents and wife Kathryn. Sam could not believe that his father had committed suicide, according to his mother, Puncher’s first wife. “He just said straight away: ‘How could my dad do that?’” she said. “‘How could he not say goodbye to me? I don’t understand.’”
“I didn’t know how he could have inflicted all those injuries on himself without losing consciousness”
Many of Puncher’s relatives were unwilling to be named in the context of his death, but a source close to the family said they were baffled that he had been sent back to Russia in the direct aftermath of the public inquiry that had accused Putin of ordering an assassination. “I would be highly critical of sending somebody who had been investigating Litvinenko on a trip to Moscow,” the source told BuzzFeed News.
Dr Phil Blower, a long-time friend of Puncher’s, also wants answers. “It’s very weird that he goes off to Russia then he comes back and is suddenly depressed and irrational,” he said. “I think there are definitely still questions to be asked, and I’m astonished that none of this is being investigated by anyone serious.”
A spokesperson for Public Health England said the “verdict of the Coroner was clear” that Puncher committed suicide, and the agency's “thoughts remain with Dr Puncher’s family".
But the former senior Scotland Yard counter-terror officer who spoke to BuzzFeed News said Puncher’s sudden change of mood should not have been enough to persuade police to rule out foul play in his death. “The state can mess up minds, it can do all sorts of things. It has research laboratories, it has science facilities,” he said. “There are all sorts of drugs that can be given to people to create depression.” He said the proximity of Puncher’s changes of mood to his trips to Russia was potentially “very serious” and should be investigated fully. And he said the local Thames Valley police were in no way equipped to carry out the task. It should, he said, have been taken over by Scotland Yard’s counter-terror team – who have the security clearance needed to communicate with Britain’s spy agencies in case they have any intelligence that might be relevant to solving a case.
Behind the scenes, even as the police investigation was being shut down, BuzzFeed News has learned from four intelligence officials that US spy agencies were providing Britain’s secret intelligence service with information connecting Puncher’s death to Russia. The officials told BuzzFeed News that one factor they take into consideration when assessing whether suspicious deaths can be connected to the Kremlin is: “Could Russia be driving these people to suicide?” But in Puncher’s case, they said their assessment was that he had likely been assassinated. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment on intelligence matters.
In a bizarre twist, after the suicide verdict there was one entity still eager to connect Puncher’s death to the Litvinenko inquiry: the Russian government. Channel One, a state-controlled Russian television outlet, aired a segment calling it a “very strange suicide” and asked, “What was Matthew Puncher afraid of?”
The presenter raised the question: “Could he have made a mistake in the case of Litvinenko?", adding that "according to the British authorities, this question is not relevant”.
US spies watch such pronouncements from Kremlin-controlled media outlets closely. “When Russia kills people they do it to send a message,” one high-ranking official said: “Don’t cross Putin."
In our next story, BuzzFeed News will reveal the last of the 14 deaths US intelligence officials believe is linked to Russia.
Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com. To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in LA. Recipient: IRE 2016 FOI award; Newseum Institute National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame. PGP fingerprint 46DB 0712 284B 8C6E 40FF 7A1B D3CD 5720 694B 16F0. Contact this reporter at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com
Contact Jason Leopold at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com.
Tom Warren is an investigations correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in London.
Contact Tom Warren at tom.warren@buzzfeed.com.
Alex Campbell is the deputy UK investigations editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in London. His secure PGP fingerprint is 0712 96AD 2FED CEF9 AFA7 9280 0397 E646 0A39 2C8A
Contact Alex Campbell at alex.campbell@buzzfeed.com.
Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @dtownreppin214 @Ed MOTHERfukkING G
^^^breh I don't need to be tagged in everything.
MORE SANCTIONS!!!
RUSSIAN SANCTIONS GALORE!!!!
US oil groups feel Russia sanctions freeze more than Europeans
Rivals gain ground with less aggressive EU stance
11 minutes ago
© FT montage / Getty
Russian President Vladimir Putin this month made an emotional tribute to Christophe de Margerie, the former boss of France’s Total who was killed in an accident in 2014.
At the launch of a new gas tanker named after Mr de Margerie, Mr Putin declared him a “great friend of our country”, a sentiment that extends to many executives at Total’s European oil and gas peers.
While US energy groups stepped back from Russia in response to a sanctions regime that Washington lawmakers moved to tighten this month, rivals in the EU have held fast, ducking through loopholes in Brussels’ restrictions to keep joint ventures running.
Elizabeth Rosenberg, a sanctions expert formerly at the US Treasury and now with the Center for a New American Security, points to the “regulatory arbitrage” between the EU and US sanctions. “US firms see an uneven playing field,” says Ms Rosenberg.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been a glittering prize for foreign oil companies. With proved reserves of 110bn barrels of oil and 32tn cubic metres of gas, according to BP, it is one of the world’s largest holders of economically producible hydrocarbons.
Sanctions slapped on Moscow in 2014 by the US, EU and other countries in response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea were aimed at cutting off the development of its new oil frontiers from western help.
In practice, however, not all sanctions have proven equal. ExxonMobil of the US reacted sharply by freezing capital and suspending projects, a position expected to become entrenched if new legislation that tightens restrictions further is written into law.
But the sanctions imposed by the EU have had a less decisive impact, in part owing to less stringent and less aggressive regulators in Brussels compared to Washington, according to trade experts.
Rainer Seele, chief executive of OMV, the Austrian oil and gas company, told the FT that sanctions had had little impact on its business in Russia. “We have made millions of legal checks, and the message is clear we are in full compliance with the sanctions,” he says.
Lawyers say US companies are more circumspect due to the strict approach of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (Ofac), the body with the job of monitoring sanctions adherence, which is seen as more effective in ensuring compliance than its EU counterpart.
“Ofac is a much-feared, powerful and active agency . . . When it penalises breaches, it is swift, effective and painful and it makes it very public,” says Robert Volterra, partner at law firm Volterra Fietta. “Observers calculate that it is better to err on the side of caution.”
In Europe, by contrast, implementation is left to individual countries, offering possible loopholes not available in the US. “It is not a robust enforcement system,” says Mr Volterra. “EU companies think, probably correctly, that they have greater latitude under EU sanctions.”
European rules, for example, offer a “grandfathering” provision, so that projects that were under way before the sanctions can continue. Italy’s Eni and Rosneft, the state-controlled oil group, are preparing to start drilling a well in the eastern Black Sea, for example, making further progress with a joint venture set up in 2013.
Exxon has a joint venture with Rosneft in the same region, but has not been allowed to start drilling. After reports in April that the company was seeking a waiver from the Trump administration, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin issued a statement that the department “will not be issuing waivers to US companies, including Exxon, authorising drilling prohibited by current Russian sanctions”.
This month, chief executives at Total, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil took part in the St Petersburg International Economic Forum hosted by Mr Putin. But while many European companies announced new deals or progress on existing projects in Russia, Exxon had nothing to show for the visit.
The lack of progress marks a sharp reversal of Exxon’s fortunes in Russia. The US oil company had signed a lucrative series of deals between 2011 and 2013 with Rosneft on a range of projects in the Arctic, the Black Sea and shale formations in western Siberia.
Those plans were blocked by sanctions and, in 2014, Exxon was forced to wind down its joint ventures with Rosneft at a cost of about $1bn.
In stark contrast, European rivals continue to develop new projects. Total has not had to pull out of the $27bn Yamal LNG liquefied natural gas plant. Gas projects were excluded from the sanctions — in part because of the EU’s reliance on imports of Russian gas.
“I think that our job is to demonstrate, as we have done, that despite sanctions we are able to build these gigantic projects such as Yamal LNG, putting in place the financing,” Total chief executive Patrick Pouyanne told Tass, Russia’s state-run news agency this month.
Royal Dutch Shell is also discussing new gas developments in Russia, including an expansion of Sakhalin 2, an LNG plant in the country’s far east. At the St Petersburg forum, Britain’s BP announced “an agreement on strategic co-operation in gas” with Rosneft, including plans to sell more Russian gas to European markets.
Even oil projects backed by European groups are also being waved through. Spain’s Repsol last month applied for permission from Russian authorities to partner with Gazprom Neft, Gazprom’s oil subsidiary, on a Siberian oil project.
Alvaro Nadal, Spain’s minister for energy and tourism, said on a recent visit to Moscow: “The sanctions have a limited field of action, and therefore there is room for co-operation.”
As well as taking a more relaxed attitude to implementing sanctions, some EU members have been vocal in opposition such as Italy, Greece and Hungary.
The proposed tightening of US sanctions backed by the Senate last week could hit some European companies by targeting those involved in Russian oil and gas pipelines. This sparked a backlash from Germany and other EU states, which have accused Washington of “illegal extraterritorial” threats.
But the proposals would also make the competitive disadvantage faced by Exxon in Russia even harder to lift.
“It is very difficult for [US] oil companies to be publicly arguing the case against the sanctions,” Ms Rosenberg says. ”It’s a really tough sell for them to say that to politicians and the public. So they are stuck with an uneven playing field.”
Additional reporting by Ralph Atkins
Novatek of Russia, France’s Total, China National Petroleum Corporation and China’s Silk Road Fund, will ship its first gas by the end of the year. The consortium announced last week that the German and Swedish export credit agencies had signed a deal to provide financing.
Other Arctic projects, such as Rosneft’s oil drilling tie-up with ExxonMobil, were frozen after western partners withdrew to stay within the law. In some cases, the Russian company has chosen to continue alone. Yamal’s owner Novatek is covered by sanctions, cutting off its access to foreign financing.
That forced Russia’s second largest gas producer to look east to Chinese funds for the bulk of the project’s $19bn external capital requirements. Chinese shareholders own 30 per cent of the project.
The loopholes in the sanctions granted to gas projects have allowed Total to continue to work alongside Novatek as a 20 per cent shareholder in Yamal.
Scheduled to start pumping gas up through the ice this winter, Total expects Yamal to produce 16.5m tons of LNG each year. With all of that already sold on decades-long contracts, it appears a healthy reward for persistence.
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22@Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight@dtownreppin214 @Ed MOTHERfukkING G
The Death Of The Spy In The Bag Is One of 14 Suspected Hits Linked To Russia
The Secrets Of The Spy In The Bag
After the dead body of an MI6 spy was found locked in a sports bag in London, police said the death was “probably an accident” – but British and American spy agencies have secret intelligence suggesting Gareth Williams may have been assassinated over highly sensitive work on Russia.
June 20, 2017, at 12:55 p.m.
This is Part Four of a BuzzFeed News investigation.
Part One: Poison In The System
Part Two: From Russia With Blood
Part Three: The Man Who Knew Too Much
A British spy whose naked body was found decomposing in a padlocked sports bag in his bathtub is among at least 14 people suspected of having been killed by Russian assassins on British soil, BuzzFeed News can reveal.
Police declared the death of Gareth Williams “probably an accident” – but British intelligence agencies have been secretly communicating with their American counterparts about suspicions that the spy was executed by Russian assassins, four US intelligence officials told BuzzFeed News.
An ongoing BuzzFeed News investigation has revealed that British and American spy agencies have intelligence connecting a string of suspected assassinations in the UK to Russian state agents or organised criminals – who sometimes cooperate. One high-ranking US intelligence source said: “The Kremlin has aggressively stepped up its efforts to eliminate and silence its enemies abroad over the past couple of years – particularly in Britain.” A second serving official said the circumstances of Williams’ death and 13 others “suggest Russian involvement” and demand “more investigation from the UK”. In all 14 cases, police ruled out foul play while intelligence agencies secretly compiled information connecting the deaths to Russia.
Williams, a 31-year-old codebreaker for Britain’s Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), had been assigned to MI6, and in the months before his death, sources said, he was working with the US National Security Agency. Two senior British police sources with direct knowledge of the case said some of his work was focused on Russia – and one confirmed reports that he had been helping the NSA trace international money-laundering routes that are used by organised crime groups including Moscow-based mafia cells. The NSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Rex / REX/Shutterstock
An independent coroner who oversaw the inquest into the spy's death noted in a narrative verdict that it was probably “criminally mediated”. That conclusion “wasn’t what the government wanted,” according to a high-ranking MI6 officer who was serving when the spy died, because it “gives validity to an assumption there was some conspiracy”, for which he insisted there was “absolutely no evidence”.
Scotland Yard, the HQ of Britain’s premier police force, pledged to look into the case further. Then, in 2013, it announced that Williams’ death was likely accidental. Scotland Yard declined to answer a detailed list of questions sent by BuzzFeed News. Citing national security, the British government refused to discuss the specifics of the Williams case or any of the other 13 deaths revealed by BuzzFeed News, but said in a statement that it “takes seriously its obligation to protect people in the UK from hostile state activity – including assassinations”.
Williams went missing in August 2010, and the security services failed to notify the police when he didn’t turn up for work. After his sister raised the alarm with GCHQ, detectives went to his secret service flat in Pimlico – just over the bridge from MI6’s Vauxhall headquarters – and discovered his body.
Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who has now retired, was the most senior officer to attend the scene. He told BuzzFeed News he immediately suspected foul play and believed that the flat had been cleaned up to destroy evidence before the police arrived.
It was a warm August day, but the heating had been turned up to full blast inside and “the flat was absolutely baking”, Sutton told BuzzFeed News. “I imagine that was done deliberately to try to accelerate decomposition.” The body was so badly decomposed that it was impossible for pathologists to determine whether Williams had certain poisons in his system when he died, his inquest heard.
Williams’ body was in a red North Face sports bag which had been placed in the bath – but police found no fingerprints or traces of Williams’ DNA on the rim of the tub, on the bag’s zipper, or on the padlock. The key had been placed under the spy’s decomposing body inside the bag.
Williams’ laptop, mobile phone, and other materials were all laid out neatly on a table in the living room. To Sutton, it appeared that someone had “staged” the crime scene – wiping the flat down to remove DNA and fingerprints, removing incriminating evidence, and leaving out decoy items out for the police to find easily. “It was pretty bloody obvious,” he said. “It was too clean. It was too easy. It was all there on a plate for us.”
Even though Williams had been dead for about 10 days by the time his body was found, no one at GCHQ or MI6 had alerted the police – and even when they realised he was missing, both agencies delayed taking action. Williams’ sister had alerted GCHQ that her brother was missing at around 11.30am, Sutton said, but it was not until around 4.30pm that the spy agencies called the police and requested they visit his flat. “What,” Sutton asked, “went on in those missing five hours?” He told other investigators of his concerns about the crime scene, he said, “but people kind of shrugged their shoulders”.
A high-ranking counter-terror detective who helped oversee the investigation into Williams’ death and asked not to be named told BuzzFeed News that he understood the spy had been working on Russian intelligence-gathering in his final months, and said his death ranked “at the top end of suspiciousness”.
The web of death
FSBThe KremlinRussian mafiaStephen MossStephen CurtisIgor PonomarevAlexander LitvinenkoYuri GolubevDaniel McGroryBadri PatarkatsishviliGareth WilliamsPaul CastleAlexander PerepilichnyyRobbie CurtisBoris BerezovskyJohnny ElichaoffScot YoungMatthew Puncher200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017
Chris Applegate and Tim Lane / BuzzFeed News
Click on the images to learn more about each death
Williams’ highly secretive work created immediate obstacles for the police. The murder detectives involved were blocked from interviewing his colleagues at MI6 or reviewing relevant documents. Instead, they had to rely upon police officers from SO15, the national counter-terrorism force, who had the security clearance to review the material and pass along anonymised notes.
Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com.
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The detective chief inspector in charge of the case, Jackie Sebire, did not even learn of some of the evidence relevant to the case – including nine computer memory sticks in a bag found at Williams’ MI6 office – until the coroner’s inquest more than 18 months later. “Naturally, she was upset,” Sutton told BuzzFeed News. Sebire did not respond to a request for comment.
In the wake of Williams’ death, the police briefed the media that he had been visiting bondage websites and drag clubs and had a £15,000 collection of women’s designer clothing. The MI6 insider who spoke to BuzzFeed News said Williams’ “sexual proclivities were sufficiently unusual” to justify the “assumption” that he had asphyxiated by accident in a sex game gone wrong.
A key question during the inquest was whether the spy could have got into the North Face bag by himself. A pathologist for the Home Office said this was possible, but Peter Faulding, an expert who specialises in rescuing people from confined spaces, said he tried to lock himself into an identical bag 300 different times but failed.
Key evidence was lost because Williams' body had been decomposing for around 10 days by the time it was found, meaning postmortem examinations could not determine whether he had been drugged or poisoned before his death. MI6 offered the family a “profound apology” for the delay in reporting Williams’ disappearance.
Williams’ family declined to speak with BuzzFeed News, but lawyers for the spy’s parents and sister said in court the family believed a third party had been involved in his death or had destroyed evidence at the scene, and they suspected this person “was a member of some agency specialising in the dark arts of the secret services”.
The coroner, Fiona Wilcox, delivered an open verdict, saying that though there was likely criminal involvement in Williams' death, she could not say with certainty. Scotland Yard undertook to investigate further, but 18 months later officers announced that Williams had “probably” died by accident. At a press briefing, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt said that he believed it was “theoretically possible” Williams had padlocked the bag from the inside, though he conceded that “many questions remain unanswered”.
Hewitt strenuously denied that intelligence agencies had covered up what happened to Williams. “I do not believe that I have had the wool pulled over my eyes,” he said.
At the same time, BuzzFeed News has learned MI6 was sitting on secret US intelligence suggesting Williams’ death could be connected to his work on Russia. American officials did not disclose details of the intelligence they have relating to Williams’ death, but four high-ranking intelligence sources confirmed that the information had been shared with Britain’s secret service.
After the police announced in 2013 that they believed his death was an accident, the family released a statement: “The fact that the circumstances of his death are still unknown adds to our grief.”
Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com. To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
READ MORE:
Poison In The System: Explosive Evidence Of A Russian Assassination On British Soil That The Government Doesn’t Want You To Read
From Russia With Blood: 14 Suspected Hits On British Soil That The Government Ignored
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Scientist Who Helped Connect Litvinenko To The Kremlin “Assassinated” In Britain
Tom Warren is an investigations correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in London.
Contact Tom Warren at tom.warren@buzzfeed.com.
Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in LA. Recipient: IRE 2016 FOI award; Newseum Institute National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame. PGP fingerprint 46DB 0712 284B 8C6E 40FF 7A1B D3CD 5720 694B 16F0. Contact this reporter at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com
Contact Jason Leopold at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com.
Alex Campbell is the deputy UK investigations editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in London. His secure PGP fingerprint is 0712 96AD 2FED CEF9 AFA7 9280 0397 E646 0A39 2C8A
Contact Alex Campbell at alex.campbell@buzzfeed.com.
Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
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The Secrets Of The Spy In The Bag
After the dead body of an MI6 spy was found locked in a sports bag in London, police said the death was “probably an accident” – but British and American spy agencies have secret intelligence suggesting Gareth Williams may have been assassinated over highly sensitive work on Russia.
June 20, 2017, at 12:55 p.m.
This is Part Four of a BuzzFeed News investigation.
Part One: Poison In The System
Part Two: From Russia With Blood
Part Three: The Man Who Knew Too Much
A British spy whose naked body was found decomposing in a padlocked sports bag in his bathtub is among at least 14 people suspected of having been killed by Russian assassins on British soil, BuzzFeed News can reveal.
Police declared the death of Gareth Williams “probably an accident” – but British intelligence agencies have been secretly communicating with their American counterparts about suspicions that the spy was executed by Russian assassins, four US intelligence officials told BuzzFeed News.
An ongoing BuzzFeed News investigation has revealed that British and American spy agencies have intelligence connecting a string of suspected assassinations in the UK to Russian state agents or organised criminals – who sometimes cooperate. One high-ranking US intelligence source said: “The Kremlin has aggressively stepped up its efforts to eliminate and silence its enemies abroad over the past couple of years – particularly in Britain.” A second serving official said the circumstances of Williams’ death and 13 others “suggest Russian involvement” and demand “more investigation from the UK”. In all 14 cases, police ruled out foul play while intelligence agencies secretly compiled information connecting the deaths to Russia.
Williams, a 31-year-old codebreaker for Britain’s Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), had been assigned to MI6, and in the months before his death, sources said, he was working with the US National Security Agency. Two senior British police sources with direct knowledge of the case said some of his work was focused on Russia – and one confirmed reports that he had been helping the NSA trace international money-laundering routes that are used by organised crime groups including Moscow-based mafia cells. The NSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Rex / REX/Shutterstock
An independent coroner who oversaw the inquest into the spy's death noted in a narrative verdict that it was probably “criminally mediated”. That conclusion “wasn’t what the government wanted,” according to a high-ranking MI6 officer who was serving when the spy died, because it “gives validity to an assumption there was some conspiracy”, for which he insisted there was “absolutely no evidence”.
Scotland Yard, the HQ of Britain’s premier police force, pledged to look into the case further. Then, in 2013, it announced that Williams’ death was likely accidental. Scotland Yard declined to answer a detailed list of questions sent by BuzzFeed News. Citing national security, the British government refused to discuss the specifics of the Williams case or any of the other 13 deaths revealed by BuzzFeed News, but said in a statement that it “takes seriously its obligation to protect people in the UK from hostile state activity – including assassinations”.
Williams went missing in August 2010, and the security services failed to notify the police when he didn’t turn up for work. After his sister raised the alarm with GCHQ, detectives went to his secret service flat in Pimlico – just over the bridge from MI6’s Vauxhall headquarters – and discovered his body.
Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who has now retired, was the most senior officer to attend the scene. He told BuzzFeed News he immediately suspected foul play and believed that the flat had been cleaned up to destroy evidence before the police arrived.
It was a warm August day, but the heating had been turned up to full blast inside and “the flat was absolutely baking”, Sutton told BuzzFeed News. “I imagine that was done deliberately to try to accelerate decomposition.” The body was so badly decomposed that it was impossible for pathologists to determine whether Williams had certain poisons in his system when he died, his inquest heard.
Williams’ body was in a red North Face sports bag which had been placed in the bath – but police found no fingerprints or traces of Williams’ DNA on the rim of the tub, on the bag’s zipper, or on the padlock. The key had been placed under the spy’s decomposing body inside the bag.
Williams’ laptop, mobile phone, and other materials were all laid out neatly on a table in the living room. To Sutton, it appeared that someone had “staged” the crime scene – wiping the flat down to remove DNA and fingerprints, removing incriminating evidence, and leaving out decoy items out for the police to find easily. “It was pretty bloody obvious,” he said. “It was too clean. It was too easy. It was all there on a plate for us.”
Even though Williams had been dead for about 10 days by the time his body was found, no one at GCHQ or MI6 had alerted the police – and even when they realised he was missing, both agencies delayed taking action. Williams’ sister had alerted GCHQ that her brother was missing at around 11.30am, Sutton said, but it was not until around 4.30pm that the spy agencies called the police and requested they visit his flat. “What,” Sutton asked, “went on in those missing five hours?” He told other investigators of his concerns about the crime scene, he said, “but people kind of shrugged their shoulders”.
A high-ranking counter-terror detective who helped oversee the investigation into Williams’ death and asked not to be named told BuzzFeed News that he understood the spy had been working on Russian intelligence-gathering in his final months, and said his death ranked “at the top end of suspiciousness”.
The web of death
FSBThe KremlinRussian mafiaStephen MossStephen CurtisIgor PonomarevAlexander LitvinenkoYuri GolubevDaniel McGroryBadri PatarkatsishviliGareth WilliamsPaul CastleAlexander PerepilichnyyRobbie CurtisBoris BerezovskyJohnny ElichaoffScot YoungMatthew Puncher200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017
Chris Applegate and Tim Lane / BuzzFeed News
Click on the images to learn more about each death
Williams’ highly secretive work created immediate obstacles for the police. The murder detectives involved were blocked from interviewing his colleagues at MI6 or reviewing relevant documents. Instead, they had to rely upon police officers from SO15, the national counter-terrorism force, who had the security clearance to review the material and pass along anonymised notes.
Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com.
To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
The detective chief inspector in charge of the case, Jackie Sebire, did not even learn of some of the evidence relevant to the case – including nine computer memory sticks in a bag found at Williams’ MI6 office – until the coroner’s inquest more than 18 months later. “Naturally, she was upset,” Sutton told BuzzFeed News. Sebire did not respond to a request for comment.
In the wake of Williams’ death, the police briefed the media that he had been visiting bondage websites and drag clubs and had a £15,000 collection of women’s designer clothing. The MI6 insider who spoke to BuzzFeed News said Williams’ “sexual proclivities were sufficiently unusual” to justify the “assumption” that he had asphyxiated by accident in a sex game gone wrong.
A key question during the inquest was whether the spy could have got into the North Face bag by himself. A pathologist for the Home Office said this was possible, but Peter Faulding, an expert who specialises in rescuing people from confined spaces, said he tried to lock himself into an identical bag 300 different times but failed.
Key evidence was lost because Williams' body had been decomposing for around 10 days by the time it was found, meaning postmortem examinations could not determine whether he had been drugged or poisoned before his death. MI6 offered the family a “profound apology” for the delay in reporting Williams’ disappearance.
Williams’ family declined to speak with BuzzFeed News, but lawyers for the spy’s parents and sister said in court the family believed a third party had been involved in his death or had destroyed evidence at the scene, and they suspected this person “was a member of some agency specialising in the dark arts of the secret services”.
The coroner, Fiona Wilcox, delivered an open verdict, saying that though there was likely criminal involvement in Williams' death, she could not say with certainty. Scotland Yard undertook to investigate further, but 18 months later officers announced that Williams had “probably” died by accident. At a press briefing, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt said that he believed it was “theoretically possible” Williams had padlocked the bag from the inside, though he conceded that “many questions remain unanswered”.
Hewitt strenuously denied that intelligence agencies had covered up what happened to Williams. “I do not believe that I have had the wool pulled over my eyes,” he said.
At the same time, BuzzFeed News has learned MI6 was sitting on secret US intelligence suggesting Williams’ death could be connected to his work on Russia. American officials did not disclose details of the intelligence they have relating to Williams’ death, but four high-ranking intelligence sources confirmed that the information had been shared with Britain’s secret service.
After the police announced in 2013 that they believed his death was an accident, the family released a statement: “The fact that the circumstances of his death are still unknown adds to our grief.”
Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com. To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
READ MORE:
Poison In The System: Explosive Evidence Of A Russian Assassination On British Soil That The Government Doesn’t Want You To Read
From Russia With Blood: 14 Suspected Hits On British Soil That The Government Ignored
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Scientist Who Helped Connect Litvinenko To The Kremlin “Assassinated” In Britain
Tom Warren is an investigations correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in London.
Contact Tom Warren at tom.warren@buzzfeed.com.
Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in LA. Recipient: IRE 2016 FOI award; Newseum Institute National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame. PGP fingerprint 46DB 0712 284B 8C6E 40FF 7A1B D3CD 5720 694B 16F0. Contact this reporter at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com
Contact Jason Leopold at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com.
Alex Campbell is the deputy UK investigations editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in London. His secure PGP fingerprint is 0712 96AD 2FED CEF9 AFA7 9280 0397 E646 0A39 2C8A
Contact Alex Campbell at alex.campbell@buzzfeed.com.
Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22@Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @dtownreppin214 @Ed MOTHERfukkING G
German anti-terror police uncover hidden paramilitary training camps for far-right extremists
Friday 23 June 2017 15:50 BST
The forest near Rodacherbrunn, Thuringia, in Germany in October 2016 Getty Images
Guns, weapons and drugs have been seized from a network of right-wing extremists operating paramilitary training camps in German forests amid fears of a potential attack.
Investigators in the state of Thuringia said at least 13 known suspects were part of the group, including some from an “internationally active right-wing movement”.
The state office of criminal investigation said short and long-range guns, ammunition and other weaponry was uncovered alongside a small amount of drugs.
Police also seized right-wing propaganda, mobile phones and computers in dawn raids at 14 properties in Thuringia, Erfurt and Göttingen, in Lower Saxony.
A spokesperson said the operation targeted a “criminal organisation” accused of setting up paramilitary training camps in the region’s forests, adding: “Some of the suspects are believed to be members of an internationally-active right-wing extremist movement, which aims to abolish the social and governmental order of Germany and other European states.”
The raids were coordinated by Germany’s GSG 9 counter-terror force, supported by police from six states. Authorities did not confirm whether the group was plotting an attack.
Numerous weapons and items with banned Nazi symbols were found in the raids on another far-right group in Germany in 2015 (EPA)
During the searches, a man who was not originally under investigation was arrested for attacking and injuring two officers.
Another suspect was arrested for using symbols of “unconstitutional organisations” – a phrase frequently used by Germany authorities to refer to Nazi-era memorabilia and symbols including the swastika.
Officials said the suspect found with “numerous” guns was believed to be a member of the so-called Reichsbürger movement, which claims the current German state is illegitimate and is alleged to have neo-Nazi links.
Police are now investigating whether to withdraw his firearms licence.
A Reichsbürger shot a police officer dead during a raid in Bavaria in October, shocking Germany and prompting a government crackdown on resurgent far-right groups.
A police officer at a house in Georgensgmünd, Germany, where a far-right extremist opened fire on police during a raid on 19 October (DPA/Getty)
Politicians from Germany’s Die Linke party claimed the network uncovered on Friday was linked to the far-right Europäische Aktion (European Action) group, which was founded by a Swiss Holocaust denier in 2008.
Europäische Aktion’s stated aims include creating a European “confederation” that would abolish the Euro and the EU, force the return of anyone judged to be non-Europeans to their countries of origin, and abolish Germany and Austria in favour of a “Reich” with pre-Second World War borders.
Its Facebook page, which remains online, propagates neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic and white supremacist ideology claiming the existence of a “long-planned campaign to exterminate the indigenous peoples of Europe” with an “invasion” from Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Europäische Aktion’s members are based in Germany, Switzerland and Austria but active in a far wider set of countries including the UK, France, Hungary, Spain and Sweden.
Die Welt reported that the organisation was intending to dissolve and re-form under a different name to evade investigations by authorities.
Germany has been shaken by a series of Isis-related terror attacks, as well as the Reichsbürger murder and foiled plots from both Islamists and the far-right.
Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks
Earlier this year, a Bundeswehr soldier was found posing as a Syrian refugee to plot a false flag shooting attack that prosecutors said aimed to turn Germany against migrants.
A group of extremists from the far-right Oldschool Society group have been put on trial for plotting to attack accommodation for asylum seekers, while a homemade bomb emblazoned with a swastika and symbol of the Nazi SS was discovered earlier this year.
Thousands of attacks on refugee centres have been documented as part of a rise in political violence by both the right and left wing, amid heightened tensions over the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers in Germany and sex attacks in Cologne.
On Thursday, the Bundestag voted to cut off state funding for the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), which narrowly escaped being banned earlier this year.
The party, viewed by Germany's intelligence agency as racist, anti-Semitic and revisionist, has never won a seat in the federal parliament and has lost all its seats in regional assemblies.
But it retains representatives on local councils, and so receives about €1m (£880,000) a year from the German government.
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