On 13 December, a court in Moscow arrested in-absentia Muradi Kavtarashvili, accused of promoting terrorism; according to a source, he is a relative of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, reported the Caucasian Knot. According to the source, Muradi Kavtarashvili lived in Germany under the name of Tornike Kavtarashvili. Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of the Russian President, said that many people involved in "killings during the bloody events in the Caucasus" are hiding in Europe.
A few days earlier, the Russian government declared two German diplomats as persona non-grata in retaliation to the expulsion of two Russian diplomats from Germany. A spokeswoman for the German Foreign Ministry said the move "sends the wrong signal and is unjustified." German ambassador to Moscow Geza von Geyr said he "acknowledges with regret" the decision from the Kremlin to "declare two employees of the German embassy in Moscow personae non grata." He added that the two diplomats in question "have with full integrity worked in this host country and have done nothing worthy of blame."
Before expelling the two German diplomats, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave his opinion on Khangoshivili at a press conference in Paris where he met with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “He is a cruel and blood-thirsty person. In just one of the attacks in which he took part, he killed 98 people. He was one of the organizers of explosions in the Moscow metro,” he said, neglecting the involvement of Russia in the case. “I don’t know what happened to him. It’s a criminal milieu and there, anything can happen, but I believe that it is not appropriate to expel diplomats who have nothing to do with this, purely on the basis of preliminary conclusions,” he added.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas denied that any request came from Russia to extradite Khangoshvili. “There is nothing, neither with us, nor with the Interior Ministry, nor with the authorities responsible for requests for legal assistance. And to say now that we could have delivered him long ago -- it simply didn’t happen,” he said.
On 4 December, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared two workers from the Russian embassy in Berlin as persona non grata with the reason of insufficient cooperation with the German authorities in Zelimkhan Khangoshvili’s murder case (Caucasus Watch reported). Khangoshvili was murdered by broad daylight in Berlin on 24 August by a mountain bike rider (Caucasus Watch reported). The British investigative journalism website Bellingcat in cooperation with the German newspaper Der Spiegel and the Russian Insider conducted an investigation in order to trace the origins of the suspect. They established that the assassin travelled to Berlin via France under a genuinely issued, non-biometric Russian passport in the name of Vadim Andreevich Sokolov, but the person did not exist in the Russian database (Caucasus Watch reported).
