Poisoning of the Bulgarian businessman Goebrev: new information has appeared

The Insider and the Bellingcat investigation published the conclusions of their investigation, which led to the disclosure of the names of all GRU employees who tried to poison the Bulgarian entrepreneur Emelyan Goebrev. The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the German publication Der Spiegel.

Earlier, The Insider and Bellingcat have already written about the involvement of GRU employees in poisoning by the neuro-paralytic substance of the Bulgarian entrepreneur Emelyan Gebrev, his son and colleague.

On April 28, 2015, Emelian Goebrev during a reception arranged during the day for partners felt unwell and lost consciousness later. The colleagues who were nearby called the doctors and immediately took Goebrev to the hospital. Around the same time, similar symptoms of malaise appeared in his son, who was in another part of the city. Signs of poisoning were also noted by the director of the company, who was also far away. However, there was a circumstance common to all three: a few hours before the reception, in the morning of the same day, they were in one place - in their office in the building of the orbit hotel in Sofia.

Later (already in 2019), investigators identified on the records of video cameras installed in the hotel parking, GRU officer Denis Sergeyev (operational name Sergei Fedotov). It was the same Sergeev who arrived in Britain with Boshirov and Petrov on the day of the Skripals poisoning.

The Laboratory of the University of Helsinki, specializing in chemical weapons, was able to find traces of two organophosphates in the Goebrev body. They gave reasons for suspicions that the businessman tried to kill the neuro-paralytic substance from the Novice family.

The investigators of The Insider, Bellingcat and Der Spiegel magazine found that Sergeyev was not the only executor of the plan. Judging by the available data, at least seven GRU employees participated in the operation.

The publication on The Insider says that a group of poisoners visited Bulgaria three times. In February 2015, the group included: Sergey Fedotova (real name - Denis Sergeev), Sergey Pavlov (Sergey Lyutnko) and Georgy Gorshkov (Peter Borisov). Seven days of stay in Bulgaria (from February 15 to 22), Ivan Lebedev (Ivan Terentyev), Nikolai Kononikhin (Nikolai Yezhov) and Alexei Nikitin (Alexey Kalinin) came to them. And a week later, Vladimir Popov flew up (Vladimir Moiseev), known in his participation in an unsuccessful attempt to a coup in Montenegro. He remained in Bulgaria from 6 to 11 March.

The second visit of the group coincided with an attempt. Fedotov, Pavlov and Gorshkov arrived on April 24 and flew away on the day of poisoning-the 28th.

The third time, Fedotov flew in the company with Danil Stepanov (Danil Kapralov) on May 23. They spent another week in Bulgaria, and Gorshkov joined them in the last two days. It was in May that Goebrev again felt a deterioration in well -being and again hit the hospital.

The GRU conspirators, in all likelihood, decided to take into account the experience of previous revelations and began to replace photos and some other data in passport files to cover their personalities. But, as the authors of the current publication noted ironically, it would be better if they did not do this: women's photos are now in men's passport files.

The reason for Goebrev’s poisoning has yet to be established.

As the participants in an independent investigation noted, Goebrev's company is engaged in weapons export, but not on such a scale so that this could become a big problem for the Kremlin. Goebrev really delivered weapons to Georgia during the 2008 war, but his share in the total volume of supplies from Bulgaria to Georgia did not exceed 10 percent.