The Tiergarten Murder: Russia's State Assassination in Berlin
A German court confirmed that the Russian state orchestrated the killing of Chechen dissident Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in 2019
Quick Facts
The Assassin from Tiergarten
On August 23, 2019, at approximately 3:35 PM, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was shot twice in the back on a bicycle path near Pfaueninsel in Berlin's Tiergarten. The 40-year-old Chechen-Georgian dissident was on his way to a mosque when he was gunned down by a man wearing a wig and riding a bicycle. Two shots from a modified Heckler & Koch P9S pistol killed him almost instantly.
The gunman attempted to flee but was overpowered by alert passersby and handed over to police.
What initially appeared to be a street crime proved to be one of the most brutal state-orchestrated assassinations on German soil since the fall of the Berlin Wall. State assassination
The Victim: A Dissident in Exile
Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was born on January 15, 1979, in Duisi, Georgia. He had fought against Russian troops during the Chechen Wars between 1999 and 2009. Russian authorities accused him of responsibility for a bombing attack on Russia's Interior Ministry in 2004, which killed an officer. He was wanted in Russia.
Since 2008, Khangoshvili had lived under a false name—"Vadim Sokolov"—in Germany as an asylum seeker. He had previously survived several assassination attempts in Georgia, including in 2015 when he was seriously wounded. Germany seemed like a safe haven—but Russian intelligence never lost sight of him.
