Hanging, poisoning, impalement: British officials investigating grisly Russian deaths
LONDON -- The body of a Russian exile was found Monday, eight days after an ex-Russian spy was poisoned in Britain. On Friday, police in London said it was murder, something that seems to happen a lot to Russians in the U.K.
For example, a photo shows three men together, and all three are now dead. Russia exile Nikolai Glushkov, was found strangled in his London home Monday. Oligarch Boris Berezovsky was the Russian President's arch enemy. In 2013 he was found hanged at home. The coroner called it an open verdict. Then there is Georgian businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili who collapsed from a sudden heart attack.
They are among the 14 untimely deaths of Russian exiles living in Britain, as well as British citizens caught in the Kremlin's web, all now being looked at in a new light by investigators after the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
The deaths include hanging, radiation poisoning, a Chinese extract that triggers heart attacks, being impaled on an iron railing, collapse and suffocation, found in a suitcase.
For Russian dissidents here in London, it feels like open season.
"That's making a lot of people worried," said Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a Russian dissident. "More worried than it was before."
"Nobody knows who can affect and who will be next and it's very scary," said Sergei Kapchuk, a Russian businessman and former politician living in the U.K.
Although police are careful to say Gluskov's murder can't be linked to the latest poisoning -- it can be linked to Moscow, and that's all the more frightening.