A German court on December 15 will issue a verdict in the high-profile case of a Russian man accused of shooting dead a former Chechen militant in broad daylight in a Berlin park on the orders of Moscow.
Prosecutors are calling for a life sentence for the 56-year-old suspect, Vadim Krasikov, aka Vadim Sokolov , who is accused of killing a Georgian national of Chechen origin in the Kleiner Tiergarten park in August 2019.
The shooting, which took place a short distance from the chancellery and parliament, strained already tense Russian-German relations.
A guilty verdict is expected to put the new German government under pressure to draw up an appropriate political response.
Prosecutors said Krasikov, an alleged officer in Russia’s FSB secret service, approached Tornike Kavtarashvili, aka Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, on a bicycle and shot him with a pistol equipped with a silencer.
After the 40-year-old victim fell to the ground, Krasikov is accused of shooting him in the back of the head before fleeing. Krasikov was arrested following the killing after witnesses said they saw him changing clothes behind a bush.
Prosecutors said Moscow ordered the murder because Khangoshvili was a commander of separatists in Russia’s North Caucasus region between 2000 and 2004.
Russian President Vladimir Putin described Khangoshvili as a “bandit” and “terrorist.”
In the trial, federal prosecutor Nikolaus Forschner argued it was irrelevant whether Khangoshvili was actually a terrorist because as an asylum seeker in Germany since 2016 he posed no threat to justify “preventative killing.”
Forschner accused the Russian leadership of “radically disregarding the rule of law” and violating German sovereignty.
The Russian state’s motive, prosecutors said, was retaliation as well as an effort to intimidate other Chechen asylum seekers by making them believe they are not safe from the tentacles of Russia’s security apparatus.
Russia denies all allegations over the killing.
In an earlier hearing, the defendant told the court through his lawyer that he should be identified only as Vadim Sokolov, a 50-year-old Russian construction engineer. He denied being known as Krasikov.
But prosecutors said the operation was “obviously planned well in advance,” with Russian authorities creating a cover identity of Vadim Sokolov and providing support on the ground.
They alleged the defendant traveled as a tourist in the days before the murder, arriving on August 17 in Paris where he visited sights before traveling to Warsaw.
The defense argued in court that the evidence presented by prosecutors was “highly questionable,” as were allegations of Russian state involvement.
Defense lawyer Robert Unger pointed to a lack of witnesses to what happened before the crime and questions over the identity of the suspect.
He also argued that the victim could have been targeted by other people or organizations and not the Russian state. The victim had reportedly received threating messages from a Georgian number in 2016 and was shot and injured in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, in 2015.