© AFP / dpa / Paul Zinken
Police and forensic team at a murder scene in Berlin. August 23, 2019.
Russia denies "any links" to the death of a Chechen man who was gunned down in Berlin last week.
The German press, meanwhile, said the incident may end up being a "second Skripal case."
"This case has nothing to do with the Russian state, the [Russian] authorities," the Kremlin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Wednesday. "I categorically reject any links between... this murder and official Russia."
His comments came in response to speculation that Moscow may have been somehow involved in the assassination of a man in the Kleiner Tiergarten park in central Berlin on Friday. German media identified the victim as 40-year-old Zelimkhan Khangoshvili,
a Georgian national of Chechen origin who had fought against the Russian troops during the war in Chechnya. Public broadcaster
Deutsche Welle cited a 2017 letter by a local NGO to the migration services, saying that
Khangoshvili served under infamous warlords Shamil Basayev and Abu al-Walid, who coordinated terrorist attacks on Russian soil and were killed by Russian security forces.
Khangoshvili is said to have fled Georgia in 2016 after surviving an assassination attempt. He sought asylum in Germany but this was rejected.
The German authorities had also reportedly considered him an Islamist threat at some point. Other reports said that Khangoshvili had ties with the Georgian security services and assisted in anti-terrorism operations.
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