Nikolay Glushkov, a Russian businessman in exile in Britain who had run afoul of Vladimir Putin, turned up dead Monday night, and now London police are treating his death as a murder.
While the London-based Metropolitan Police have made clear that “at this stage” there is no connection to the attempted murders of former spy [Sergei] Skripal and his daughter, the revelation that Glushkov was apparently killed—this time by "compression of the neck"—will do nothing to calm the diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West, particularly because of his close links to other controversial Russian exiles.
Glushkov was a close friend of exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, suspected by Glushkov to have been murdered on Kremlin orders in 2013.
Friday's police statement made clear that counter-terrorism police are leading the investigation into the murder, rather than local police, "because of the associations Mr Glushkov is believed to have had."
(...)
Glushkov spoke to The Guardian in 2014 about the “hit-list” of Russian exiles such as Berezovsky, his business partner Badri Patarkatsishvili who died in 2008, and former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, who was killed with radioactive poison in London.
Glushkov voiced his belief that the Kremlin was methodically killing fellow exiles on a hit-list and said gloomily: "I don't see anyone left on it apart from me."
Read more: Putin Critic Who Predicted His Own Assassination Was ‘Murdered’ in London (Daily Beast)