Salisbury attack - live updates: Second novichok suspect Dr Alexander Mishkin was 'awarded hero of the Russian Federation'
The second Russian man accused of launching the Salisbury novichok attack was also a decorated "hero of the Russian Federation", investigators have said.
Experts from the website Bellingcat said a photograph showed the man shaking hands with Vladimir Putin as he received the country's highest award.
They have named the alleged assassin who arrived in the UK under the alias Alexander Petrov as Dr Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin, who was employed by Russia's GRU intelligence agency.
That is the press conference wrapped up. Stay tuned for more coverage of the investigation as it continues, as does the British police probe into the Salisbury poisoning
Mr Grozev says it was Mishkin's grandmother with the photograph of him meeting Putin. She "vanished from the village" three days ago to visit her children and Bellingcat's partners at The Insider spoke to friends she had shown it to
Mr Grozev says Bellingcat is also investigating whether the GRU is involved in Libya, where Russia has been supporting some actors in the country's ongoing civil war.
Mr Grozev says the Skripal suspects' fake passport files were 'completely different' from a normal file because there is no history before the date the documents were created in 2009 and 2010.
The records were marked "do not provide information" for government passports and a number for further information which goes through to the GRU headquarters.
The OPCW hacking suspects had online dating profiles, including one bearing a photo taken metres from the GRU headquarters. No such luck for the Skripal suspects though
Mr Grozev says "there is concern at the official level that the GRU may have succeeded in doing something in Malaysia".
Mr Seely says the GRU has had a "remarkable reinvention" over the past 10 years and have become "victims of their own success" and been "getting sloppy".
Questions are just starting. A journalist from the Kyiv Post asks what they may have been involved with in Eastern Ukraine.
Mr Grozev says GRU operatives were "directly involved" in the takeover of city councils and the "fake idea of local defence units". A resident of Mishkin's village believed he was involved in the extraction of Yanukovych after the Maidan protests but there is no proof
Mr Seely says they are "firestarters" who kick of wars, such as in South Ossetia.
Two people contacted by Bellingcat then confirmed that Mishkin was the same person in their military academy class, and that they recognised him from police information on the Skripal attack.
Apparently everyone from the class had been contacted several weeks ago and ordered not to say anything.
Bellingcat investigators then visited Mishkin's village yesterday, meeting one woman who has a photo "of President Putin shaking Mishkin's hand and giving him the Hero of Russia award"
Mr Grozev said soldiers and militants are "relatively unprofessional and careless" but spies are not, so there was no route to track him down via social media.
Another company, which Bellingcat cannot reveal, agreed to hand over his passport details and driver's licence. They then started looking for "real human confirmation" that the man was the same person as 'Alexander Petrov'
Mr Grozev is going through how Bellingcat identified Mishkin, using phone records and address details to narrow down an "Alexander from St Petersburg". They traced him to a flat opposite a medical military academy where Mishkin trained.
In an open database they found a phone number of someone with the same name and cross-referenced it with Moscow car insurance details to link it to Volvo. That car registration was put into another database that gave the driver's address as the GRU headquarters in Moscow.
Residents in his village say it was related to Ukraine, but they are not sure if it was to do with the annexation of Crimea or the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych
Mishkin was a military doctor before being recruited by the GRU and moved to Moscow under his cover identity around 2010.
After that extensive travel started, including visits to Ukraine during the peak of the Maidan protests. He was allegedly involved in military operations in Eastern Ukraine in 2014.
He was also named a "hero of the Russian Federation"
Mishkin is from a Russian village "in the middle of nowhere" in marshland, he says. Bellingcat has identified the street he grew up on until the age of 16
Mr Grozev notes that the village is in permafrost and currently covered in slush - which was the reason the two alleged spies said they had to go back to Salisbury two days in a row. They claimed to be tourists in an interview on Russian state television
Bellingcat have accessed address details of the two men charged with carrying out the attack and their passport records, which led to the conclusion that they were GRU members and the discovery of their real names.
The man using the name Ruslan Boshirov was first identified as GRU’s Col. Anatoliy Chepiga, recipient of Russia’s highest state award the 'hero of Russia'. His real name was still listed on a monument.
Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, is now speaking. He says their initial Skripal investigation started when the Metropolitan Police released the aliases of two men accused of carrying out the novichok attack in Salisbury
Mr Seely says Bellingcat and other online detectives use both open source material and "old-fashioned detective work" to build evidence and track people.
He says a lot of techniques that were done by military experts and intelligence agencies a decade ago can now be used by online activists. The International Criminal Court itself is now using social media evidence, he says.
The 39-year-old graduated from one of Russia's elite Military Medical Academies, the group's website said.
During his studies he was recruited by the GRU and by 2010 had relocated to Moscow, where he received his undercover identity - including a second national ID and travel passport - under the alias Alexander Petrov, it added.
Bellingcat has already identified the assassin who arrived in Britain under the name Ruslan Boshirov as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga - a highly decorated officer who also worked for the GRU.
A spokesperson for the Home Office said: “We are not commenting as this is still a police investigation.”
The men are believed to have smeared novichok on Sergei Skripal's front door on 4 March and returned to Moscow hours later.
Officials in the Netherlands, where the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is based, said four Russians had been expelled after the alleged cyber strike.
British intelligence helped thwart the operation which was launched in April, a month after the poisoning.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said a number of hackers known to have launched attacks have been linked to the GRU.
The NCSC associated four new attacks with the GRU, on top of previous strikes believed to have been conducted by Russian intelligence.
Among targets of the GRU attacks were the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), transport systems in Ukraine, and democratic elections, such as the 2016 US presidential race, according to the NCSC.
The centre said it was “almost certainly” the GRU behind a “BadRabbit” attack in October 2017 that caused disruption to the Kiev metro, Odessa airport and Russia's central bank.
Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
