Even in Russia, Men Accused in Salisbury Attack Leave Few Traces

MOSCOW — Before the authorities in Britain identified Ruslan Boshirov and Aleksandr Petrov as assassins sent by the Russian government to poison a former spy living in England, men with these names traveled several times within Europe, worked in the pharmaceutical industry and kept social media profiles.

But the portraits sketched by public records and social media are very thin, and even in places where people would be expected to know them, no evidence has emerged that anyone did. British officials say the names are probably aliases.

The meager details of two lives sketched from records reported by Russian news organizations could show the real biographical information of people who just did not leave much of a trail, cases of mistaken identity, or the meticulous work of a spy agency creating a cover, or “legend” in espionage parlance, for agents before a mission.

British officials contend that the two men used a powerful agent known as Novichok on March 4 in a bid to assassinate Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England. Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, had secretly fed information to Britain, was imprisoned in Russia, and then was sent in 2010 to live in England as part of a spy swap.

Prosecutors charged the men Wednesday with attempted murder and other offenses. Prime Minister Theresa May, who had previously said the Kremlin was responsible for the attack, said they were believed to have worked for the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.

Skripal, his daughter and a police officer were sickened by the nerve agent but recovered. Two other people took ill almost four months later, apparently after finding the container with the poison, and one of them died.

According to Fontanka, a Russian news website, records show that Boshirov was born on April 12, 1978, in Dushanbe, now the capital of Tajikistan, and then the principal city of one of the Soviet Union’s republics.

A Boshirov had listed as an address a 25-story residential building on Bolshaya Naberezhnaya, a quiet street in a bedroom district of northwest Moscow. But when the news site called neighbors, they were told an elderly woman lives in the apartment and that no men were among her visitors.

The website also reported evidence that Boshirov was cited for two traffic violations a few days apart in July 2015. But the case numbers for the two enforcement proceedings did not match typical sequences, and two public databases that would normally include traffic violations did not list the infractions.

Boshirov’s pages on Facebook and VKontakte, a Russian social media site, identify him as a graduate of Moscow State University’s geography department who specialized in land hydrology and worked at Headway, a Moscow company that operates a system for monitoring drug purchases. The only photo on his Facebook account, uploaded in October 2014, shows a view of Old Town Square in Prague.

The Daily Mail, a British newspaper, reported that until this week, Boshirov had a single friend on Facebook, a woman named Yuliya Chopivskaya from Dnepr, Ukraine. She told The Daily Mail that her only encounter with the man who identified himself as Ruslan was about five years ago in Prague and lasted for just half an hour, after which she added him as a friend on Facebook.

After Boshirov was charged in the nerve agent attack, Chopivskaya was inundated with inquiries and chose to delete him from her friends list. She said she did not recognize the man in the photograph released by the British authorities.

A news channel on the messaging service Telegram reported that the email address used to register Boshirov’s Facebook page was associated with an account on Moy Mir, another social media website. That account, according to the Telegram news channel, Chudesa OSINT, had subscribed to a group called “Men’s Club” and downloaded a game called “Zombie Fight,” all typical online activities.

The Moy Mir account was active even after the poisonings last spring, with the most recent login registered on July 19.

Less is known about Aleksandr Petrov, a common combination of name and surname for Russians.

According to the flight manifests, Fontanka reported, he was born on July 13, 1979. The site found that someone with that name and birth date worked at Microgen, a Russian state-owned pharmaceutical company specializing in vaccines. But when contacted by RT_Russian, a Telegram channel associated with the state television channel RT, this Aleksandr Petrov said it was a case of mistaken identity, as he had never traveled to London.

Fontanka reported that the passports the two men used to fly to Britain had numbers suggesting they were issued no earlier than 2016, and flight records show that from September 2016 to March 2018, they visited between them five European cities: Amsterdam, Geneva, London, Milan and Paris.

According to the website, Petrov and Boshirov both had return tickets for two different Moscow-bound flights, and took the one that left from London earlier.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, said Russia had nothing to do with the poisonings. So far, he said, “legal basis” was lacking for Russia to investigate the charged men, because there had been no official request from Britain.

“If they see no point, we can only regret this,” he added.