LONDON (Reuters) – Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov, who was found dead in 2018, was strangled in his home in south-west London by an unidentified person, a British lawyer has been convicted, the BBC reported.
Glushkov fled Russia after being accused of fraud during his time as deputy director of the airline Aeroflot and received political asylum in Britain in 2010, the BBC reported on Saturday.
Forensic doctor Chinyere Inyama has ruled that Glushkov was killed illegally.
A pathology report summarized before the court said the injuries “could be consistent with a grip on the neck, applied from the back, and the aggressor being behind the victim,” the BBC reported.
British police turned to information as part of a murder investigation and said they were trying to track down a black car that was seen around his house but was never tracked.
“This was an extremely complex and challenging investigation from the beginning,” said Commander Richard Smith, head of the London Police Counter-Terrorism Command.
“Officers took hundreds of statements and collected a large amount of evidence, but so far no arrests have been made,” he said in a police statement on Friday.
The anti-terrorism police are investigating the death. It came shortly after the attempted assassination of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English town of Salisbury, although detectives said there was nothing to link the events.
Glushkov was also an associate of the late Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead in March 2013 with a scarf tied around his neck in the bathroom of a luxury mansion west of London.
His family feared he might be killed by enemies in Russia. British police and forensic experts have concluded that it was a suicide, although a British judge in 2014 reached an open verdict on Berezovsky’s death, saying he could not be sure if the Russian committed suicide or was the victim of a bad game.
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Montage by Frances Kerry