Russia's Mystery Duo Back In The Spotlight Accused Of Black Ops

Moscow, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2021 ) :In 2018, after former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury, Britain said it had identified two Russian agents seen wandering through the sleepy English town.

Their faces soon became recognisable worldwide after the UK authorities released CCTV footage and identified them as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.

Britain said they had travelled to Salisbury to assassinate Skripal, smearing his door handle with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent.

The Bellingcat investigative site, which mainly uses open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques, later concluded they were agents of Russia's GRU military intelligence outfit -- and their Names as aliases used in fake passports.

Now "Petrov" and "Boshirov" have been linked with another attack on European soil.

Over the weekend, police in the Czech Republic said they suspected them of being involved in the 2014 blast of an ammunition depot in the eastern village of Vrbetice that killed two people.

Analysts say their modus operandi reveals much about Moscow's secret activities: expeditious, reckless and without fear of consequences.

While Skripal survived the 2018 attempted assassination, a local woman was killed by Novichok after she picked up a discarded perfume bottle.

Petrov and Boshirov -- or Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, according to Bellingcat -- did little to hide their presence in Britain.

Their faces and movements were photographed and filmed from London's Gatwick Airport to Salisbury and back to London, where they flew back to Moscow from Heathrow.

In a revelation the British press made much of at the time, Bellingcat found that one of the two men's personal vehicles was registered to the GRU. The passports with their aliases had been issued almost at the same time, it added.

The two men soon appeared on television, interviewed by the head of Russia's Kremlin-funded RT (formerly Russia Today) broadcaster, Margarita Simonyan, after President Vladimir Putin insisted they had done nothing wrong.

Appearing nervous in the public eye, they claimed to be sports supplement salesmen who had gone to Salisbury for a sightseeing trip.