LONDON (Reuters) – Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov, who was found dead in 2018, was strangled by an unknown person at his home in southwest London, a British coroner has said, the BBC reported.
Glushkov fled Russia after being charged with fraud during his time as deputy director of the airline Aeroflot, and was granted political asylum in the UK in 2010, the BBC reported on Saturday.
Senior coroner Chinyere Inyama ruled that Glushkov had been wrongfully murdered.
A pathology report summarized in court said the injuries “could be consistent with a neck brace, placed from behind, and the assailant sitting behind the victim,” the BBC reported.
British police have requested information as part of a murder investigation and said they wanted to trace a black car that was seen around his home, but it has never been traced.
“This has been a hugely complex and challenging investigation from the start,” said Commander Richard Smith, head of the London Police’s Counter Terrorism Command.
“Officers have taken hundreds of statements and amassed a large amount of evidence, but no arrests have been made so far,” he said in a police statement Friday.
The anti-terrorism police are leading the investigation into the death. It happened shortly after the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury, although detectives said there was nothing linking the events.
Glushkov was also an employee 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 west of London.
His family feared he might have been murdered by enemies from Russia. British police and forensic experts concluded it was suicide, although a British judge issued an open ruling on Berezovsky’s death in 2014, saying he was unsure whether the Russian committed suicide or was the victim of foul play.
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Frances Kerry