New reports from some Russian sites are reporting that a third man with a fake name is involved in the affair of former spy Sergei Skripal in England last year. Skripal, a former military intelligence officer, had settled in the English city of Salisbury in 2010 after spending several years in a Russian prison on suspicion of spying for Britain.
In March 2018 a powerful nerve agent nearly killed him and his daughter Yulia. The responsibility for the attack was charged in Moscow, which in turn has denied any involvement.
The two aggressors identified by British intelligence are Dr. Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin, with hedging name "Alexander Petrov"And the colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, with the cover name “Ruslan Boshirov”.
Both would be in the service of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the Chief Directorate of the Armed Forces General Staff, commonly referred to as CRANE. The two men spoke on Russian television last year, denying any involvement in the attack on the Skripals.
In October last year, the Russian investigation site Fontanka claimed that a third man under the name of Sergey Fedotov may have been involved in the attack on the Skripals.
Last Thursday, another Russian investigative news site, Bellingcat, claimed that the name Sergey Fedotov seems to have come out of nowhere for operational purposes by the Russian intelligence services. According to Bellingcat, Fedotov appears to have no past before 2010, when his identity was invented by GRU using the same bogus identity techniques used for "Petrov" and "Boshirov".
Moreover, Fedotov documents show that he traveled extensively in the Middle East, Asia and Europe between the 2010 and the 2015. The Russian news site states that Fedotov would be in Bulgaria at the end of April 2015. During the same period Emilian Gebrev, a wealthy local defense entrepreneur had suddenly fallen ill. Gebrev was hospitalized with symptoms of poisoning along with his son and one of his company executives. After a few days they were all discharged. While the Bulgarian businessman was being taken to the hospital, Fedotov took a flight from Sofia to Istanbul, from where he then bought a one-way ticket to Moscow.
Gordon Corera of the BBC said he contacted the Russian embassy in London and the Kremlin in Moscow. Both sources strongly rejected the Bellingcat report. A Kremlin spokesperson warned the BBC that it was skeptical of the Bellingcat report, since "we don't know what sources their work is based on, or how competent they are." British police told Corera that they were "investigating any further suspects involved" in the attack on Skripal and were "unwilling to discuss" details of the ongoing investigation. "