(27 Sep 2018) A Russian presidential spokesman on Thursday reiterated the Kremlin's stance that the men suspected by British authorities of carrying out the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter were civilians, a day after an investigative group identified one of the suspects as an agent with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.
Dmitry Peskov said that "we continue to proceed from that information which the (Russian) president (Vladimir Putin) voiced", questioning the veracity of the report by investigative group Bellingcat.
Putin earlier in the month said the two suspects are civilians, who did nothing criminal.
British-based Bellingcat on Wednesday named one of the men suspected to have carried out the poisoning as Col. Anatoly Chepiga, an agent who was awarded Russia's highest medal, Hero of Russia, in 2014.
Peskov responded by saying that the Kremlin doesn't know who Chepiga was, but promised to check whether he received Russia's highest award.
Residents in a small Russian village have identified one of the two suspects, Russia's respected Kommersant daily said Thursday in a report that backed up the Bellingcat findings.
The suspect had been named by British authorities as Ruslan Boshirov, and he had also appeared on Russian television channel RT under that name denying any involvement in the poison attack.
The Bellingcat report published a photo from Chepiga's 2003 passport that resembled Boshirov, but didn't contain further proof that they are the same person.
Britain has charged Boshirov and another suspect, Alexander Petrov, with trying to kill Skripal and his daughter on March 4 with the Soviet-designed nerve agent Novichok in the English city of Salisbury.
Britain has said the attack received approval "at a senior level of the Russian state," an accusation Moscow has fiercely denied.
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