Spanish police said Tuesday that the bullet-riddled body of a man found in Spain is suspected to be that of a Russian defector who fled across the front line into Ukraine in an army helicopter last year.
The body was discovered on February 13 in La Cala, near the eastern port city of Alicante, Civil Guard police said. Spain’s state news agency Efe said the man was shot six times and hit by a car.
Spain’s Civil Guard said it had found documents on the body identifying the man as a 33-year-old Ukrainian national. But police now believe it could be Maksym Kuzminov, who was flown to Ukraine in an Mi-8 army helicopter and defected last year with the help of Ukrainian intelligence services. The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Andriy Yusov, confirmed to local media that a former Russian pilot had died in Spain, but did not provide further details. It is unclear why or how Kuzminov traveled to Spain.
According to Russia’s state news agency, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin, told Russian reporters that Kuzminov was a “traitor and a criminal” who began planning “dirty and horrible crimes”. He said he had become a “moral corpse.” Tas. Asked about the incident, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said he had no information about the incident and that the Russian government had not received any information through diplomatic channels.