LONDON (Reuters) – Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov, who was found dead in 2018, was strangled at his home in south-west London by an unidentified person, a British coroner said.
Glushkov fled Russia after being accused of fraud during his time as deputy director of the airline Aeroflot and received political asylum in the UK in 2010, the BBC reported on Saturday.
Forensic major Chinyere Inyama ruled that Glushkov was illegally murdered.
A pathology report summarized in court said the injuries “could be consistent with a hold on the neck, applied from behind, and that the assailant was behind the victim,” the BBC reported.
British police have called for information as part of a murder investigation and said they were looking to track down a black car that was seen around their home but has never been tracked.
“This has been a very complex and challenging investigation from the outset,” said Commander Richard Smith, head of the London Police Anti-Terrorism Command.
“Officers have taken hundreds of statements and collected a large amount of evidence, but so far no arrests have been made,” he said in a police statement on Friday.
The anti-terrorist police are leading the investigation into the death. It came shortly after the attempted murder of Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury, although detectives said there was nothing to relate the facts.
Glushkov was also a partner of the late Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead in March 2013 with a scarf tied around his neck in the bathroom of a luxury mansion in west London.
His family feared he had been killed by enemies of Russia. British police and forensics concluded it was a suicide, although in 2014 a British judge reached an open verdict on Berezovsky’s death, saying he could not be sure whether the Russian committed suicide in himself or was the victim of a dirty game.
Guy Faulconbridge Reports; Edited by Frances Kerry