Russian diplomat who died in Berlin embassy is son of senior intelligence official

German magazine Der Spiegel reported that a Russian diplomat was found dead last month after falling from one of the top floors of the Russian embassy in Berlin. The diplomat's body was found at around 7:20 a.m. on October 19, 2021, by police guarding the embassy compound.

It is not clear whether the fall was the cause of death, or whether the individual had died before the fall. Emergency services who arrived at the scene were unable to revive the diplomat. Due to the person's diplomatic status, no police investigation or autopsy was possible, and the Russian embassy repatriated the body.

The Russian embassy told Der Spiegel that the case was a tragic incident and declined further comment for ethical reasons.

Officials familiar with the case told Der Spiegel that they suspected that the diplomat, who served as second secretary at the embassy, ​​was actually an undercover FSB officer and had connections to a senior FSB general.

Bellingcat has confirmed, using open-source data, that the diplomat was the son of the Deputy Director of the FSB’s Second Service and head of the FSB’s Directorate for the Protection of Constitutional Order, General Alexey Zhalo. Car registration and address data from the leaked Cronos databases, freely available online, show that the diplomat — who also bears the first name of General Zhalo as a patronymic — was registered at the same address as the general both in Moscow and previously in Rostov, where the family is from. Current data and Google’s archived data show that the second secretary of the Russian embassy was removed from the German Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic list sometime between November 1 and 4, 2021.

As previously reported by Bellingcat and its partners, the FSB’s Second Service has been linked to the murder of Georgian asylum seeker and former Chechen rebel commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten on August 23, 2019. Telephone metadata obtained and analyzed by Bellingcat showed that the accused, murderer Vadim Krasikov, who is currently facing trial in Berlin on charges of state-ordered murder, visited the premises of the FSB’s counterterrorism center – part of the FSB’s Second Service – as well as the secure shooting training complex outside Moscow operated by the Center for Special Operations, also subordinate to the Second Service. Before his trip to Berlin, the suspected killer also communicated extensively with Eduard Bendersky, a former member of the FSB's Vympel Spetsnaz department, who repeatedly traveled on joint air reservations with the Director of the FSB's Second Service, General Alexey Sedov.

The deceased diplomat’s father, who is Sedov’s deputy, also directly oversees the Directorate for the Protection of Constitutional Order. As previously reported by Bellingcat, officers from this department were part of the FSB team that dealt with Alexey Navalny before his poisoning in August 2020, and could also be linked to the suspected poisoning of other opposition figures, including Vladimir Kara-Murza.

The deceased Russian diplomat previously served as Third Secretary of the Russian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Vienna and was based there since at least 2013. He was transferred to Berlin on June 19, 2019, two months before Khangoshvili's assassination. There is no evidence that he was involved in the planning or logistical support for the assassination.

German prosecutors have argued that the accused killer could not have acted without support on the ground, as he arrived in Berlin only hours before the murder, and therefore would not have had time to arrange the detailed escape route, e-bike and electric scooter escape, which were all crucial to the murder plan.