Four recent ‘suicides’ of high profile Russian gas industry executives ‘with links to Vladimir Putin’ are all suspicious, sources have claimed.
Two wealthy businessmen were found dead along with their family members this week in Madrid and Moscow, but now suspicions are being raised about two Kremlin-linked figures who died earlier this year.
On Tuesday, the body of Sergey Protosenya, 55, was found hanged outside a Spanish villa, with his wife Natalia, 33, and their teenage daughter Maria found hacked to death with an axe inside.
Investigators initially assumed that Protosenya, who had a fortune of £330million, had killed himself in the Lloret det Mar villa in the Costa Brava.
But local reports said evidence does not conclusively point towards this explanation, as no suicide note was found in the property and it appeared steps had been taken to ensure there were no fingerprints on the murder weapons.
The businessman had served as deputy chairman of natural gas company Novotek, a company closely linked to the Kremlin.
Just days earlier, the body of Vladislav Avayev, 51, was found in his elite Moscow penthouse alongside his wife Yelena, 47, and daughter, Maria, 13, in another apparent murder-suicide.
Avayev was previously a vice president at Gazprombank – a bank that was created to work for Russian gas giant Gazprom – and had also been a Kremlin official.
In both cases, there are suspicions that the deaths may have been staged as suicides, but detectives are still investigating.
The two macabre incidents ‘are united by the former places of work of the victims – both are connected with Putin’s inner circle,’ according to Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit’, and they both involved the killing of their immediate family.
But there are also two other deaths of prominent gas industry executives this year which have aroused suspicion.
On February 25, the day after the Ukraine war started, the body of Alexander Tyulakov, 61, a senior Gazprom financial and security official at deputy general director level, was discovered by his lover.
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