Original subtitles

MALE INTERVIEWER: Who was Alexander Perepilichnyy?

Yeah, so Perepilichnyy is...

OK, so Perepilichnyy is a story that has basically, like,

consumed a large part of our lives for the last few years.

(OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING)

The US intelligence community

was drawing up a report about Russian assassinations

and assessing the likelihood of Kremlin involvement in their deaths.

The Perepilichnyy case had a high rating

for having been ordered by the Kremlin.

(OMINOUS MUSIC INTENSIFIES)

With Perepilichnyy's case,

we were worried there would be a miscarriage of justice

if this information wasn't known.

TOM: It just flipped a switch.

It's not us, this group of journalists looking at it,

it's the US intelligence community.

And that was a moment where I just thought, like, shit, like...

We actually really are on to something.

(OMINOUS MUSIC INTENSIFIES)

(RADIO STATIC)

REPORTER: A murder investigation is being launched into the death

of another Russian on British soil.

(LOUD CLOCK GONGS)

(THEME MUSIC STARTS)

REPORTER: He told his uncle a fortnight before he died,

"If anything happens to me in the next two weeks, it won't be an accident."

(RUSSIAN SINGER RAPPING)

REPORTER: London is levitating on a sea of dirty money.

RUSSIAN MAN: If you deal with somebody

who has a very suspicious track record,

some day it will come back to haunt you.

(POLICE SIREN WAILING)

(BIRDS CHIRPING)

The rate of deaths in Surrey, suspicious or otherwise, isn't high.

It's not a huge population. It's not a huge landmass.

(POLICE SIREN WAILING)

There's obviously clear murders.

People who may be found by the side of the road

who could well have been hit by a car.

There's people who, on first sight, appear to have taken their own life,

and then there's an untimely death where there's no obvious cause.

(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING)

The news of Mr Perepilichnyy's death came into Special Branch,

because of the fact that he was a Russian who had moved into the area.

The fact of the matter remains that what detectives needed to deal with

was how he came to be found dead.

(OMINOUS MUSIC INTENSIFIES)

(OFFICE CHATTER)

With the Perepilichnyy case, that one was the one

we were racing against time to get out.

And that was because the inquest was about to start.

The initial interest in the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy really blew up.

People asking questions about whether Perepilichnyy had been poisoned.

I wanted to investigate what Perepilichnyy had been doing

just before his death.

So, that's when I turned to the chief antagonist of Vladimir Putin.

If you were to ask my friends to describe Bill Browder - me -

in one sentence,

the answer would be that I'm Putin's number one enemy.

I was running the largest investment fund in Russia.

I was expelled from Russia and declared a threat to national security.

They deported me from Russia to the UK.

When the Russians turn on you, they don't tend to do so mildly.

They tend to do so with extreme prejudice.

Putin I believe to be the richest man in the world.

And the purpose of Putin's regime has been to commit terrible crimes

in order to get that money.

Putin needs to keep everybody absolutely terrified of him.

He doesn't have to kill everybody. He just has to kill a few people

and make it so clear that terrible things will come to you if you cross Putin.

In the summer of 2010,

I was putting together YouTube videos

about corrupt police officers.

We focused on exposing crimes committed by the police officers

and the tax officers, and how much money they got.

Everybody thought we were the greatest thing since sliced bread,

"Wow, you're going after the bad guys."

One day, my colleague Jamison Firestone

got an unsolicited email from Alexander Perepilichnyy...

..who claimed he had information - bank statements of a tax official

who was in the business of authorizing illegal tax refunds.

The tax official authorized the largest illegal tax refund in the history of Russia.

The information was as good as anything we'd ever gotten

and as consequential as anything we'd ever gotten.

A true smoking gun.

But the Russians, they're playing 3D chess over there.

We didn't know whether this was a setup,

whether this guy was for real.

We didn't know if this was a way of them trying to hurt us.

(TENSE MUSIC PLAYING)

Bill said, "What do you wanna do?"

I said, "I wanna meet him." He said, "Could be dangerous."

I said, "We need to meet him. I really want to."

We've been threatened a million times already.

Hopefully, this won't end in violence of some kind.

When Jamie went to that meeting,

we had a whole bunch of plain-clothed bodyguards

scattered around the place.

We have very, very serious concerns for our safety.

This is after Litvinenko was poisoned.

(CHUCKLING) I'm not drinking any water or eating anything.

They're like, if you scratch your head, if you do like this,

all hell breaks loose and my team will get you the hell outta there.

(TENSE, MYSTERIOUS MUSIC)

This guy walks in, he introduces himself as Alexander.

Alexander Perepilichnyy was a money manager.

He was a money launderer. He was a financier in Russia.

He was part of the fraud that he ended up exposing.

BILL: He had fallen out with the people he had managed the money for,

and they threatened him with various criminal cases in Russia

if he didn't return the money.

And so he fled to the UK. He got in touch with us.

His logic was that if he exposed his enemies, that would get him off the hook.

And so he gave us the information on the illegal tax refund.

And I said, "You've given me this stuff. What do you want?"

He said, "I want you to make a movie and expose the tax inspectors."

The refund was made to three companies

that police officers working with organized criminals

stole from my client, the Hermitage Fund.

BILL: This video, it went viral in Russia and outside of Russia.

Alexander Perepilichnyy blew the whistle

on a massive Russian government-linked fraud.

And he handed over evidence of Kremlin complicity

in a huge money laundering scandal.

We knew the Russians were threatening him

with all sorts of criminal investigations

and asking for, like, a million dollars or something to close it,

but we were shocked when he died.

(HEAVY BREATHING)

Perepilichnyy had threats levelled against him.

He was afraid for his life.

His name was found on a Russian hit list.

(HEARTBEATS)

(BREATHING QUICKENS)

(SIRENS WAILING)

NEWS READER 1: Russian businessman Alex Perepilichnyy was found dead.

NEWS READER 2: Sources have told the BBC

he'd had a medical check-up months before,

no problems had been found.

NEW READER 3: He was just 44.

JANE: The police, when they found his body that day,

almost immediately decided it was a non-suspicious death.

REPORTER 1: Police couldn't have been more clear. There was no foul play.

He died of natural causes.

BILL: When they arrived, police did not treat his death as suspicious.

I believe it was a full, open, diligent investigation

and everyone on that investigation would have been determined

to the best of their ability to come up with answers.

HEIDI: We have Gold Committee minutes which show senior officers

telling the investigating officers at the time to make this a non-issue,

telling them that there is ambient interest in this case at a government level,

telling them to keep their statements to the media bland.

There was pressure on the officers involved in that case

not to inflame speculation about Perepilichnyy's death.

The fact of the matter was that at that moment in time,

there wasn't anything to suggest that the death was suspicious.

So it was, kind of, managing expectations

around some sort of media frenzy happening.

The police lost key evidence

that limited the scope of the investigation and what could be done.

Police evidence disks containing critical digital information

from Perepilichnyy's computer went missing.

Not only the original evidence disk went missing,

but the backup copy also went missing.

They quickly said we don't see anything suspicious here.

There was nothing wrong.

HEIDI: There was all sorts of evidence

that Perepilichnyy was a man with a target on his back.

The man went and took eight million pounds worth of life insurance out.

You don't do that.

You don't do that if you don't think somebody might whack you.

His insurance company didn't want to pay out the policy.

They requested clinical investigation

into the contents of his stomach.

The police sent this to a special forensics laboratory

at a place called Kew Gardens.

(CLASSICAL STRING MUSIC PLAYING)

NEWS REPORTER 4: Plant toxicology experts from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew

were asked to help determine the cause of death.

WOMAN: Kew Gardens started as a garden in the mid 1750s.

It became a real centre for what we term plant taxonomy,

which is basically the study of plant names,

how to name them, studying their distribution.

We've actually got more scientists here than horticultural staff,

so it's really a research institute with a garden attached.

We were contacted and asked if we could help.

We had no preconceived ideas.

All we were really looking for -

could he have been given something that was a toxin?

When the specimens come in, we accession the samples.

We could see something that might have had the ion

of an alkaloid from Gelsemium.

Gelsemium is a herb that occurs mainly in parts of Asia.

HEIDI: Monique Simmonds examined the contents of his stomach

and gathered that his stomach might have contained traces of Gelsemium

which is a deadly plant poison, known to be used by assassins.

It attacks the respiratory system and it is quite fast acting.

HEIDI: Its nickname is 'heartbreak grass,'

because it's known to trigger cardiac arrest

which is exactly what Alexander Perepilichnyy died of.

That discovery suddenly drew a huge amount of attention to the case.

NEWS REPORTER 5: Traces of an extremely toxic plant in his stomach

appear to have been found.

NEWS REPORTER 6: There are many calling foul play and looking for answers.

JANE: The days leading up to Perepilichnyy's death

were largely shrouded in mystery for a long time.

A senior French law enforcement source

found some transactions on his credit card

which showed him booking rooms in two hotels for the same night in central Paris.

But nobody knew what he was doing there.

I travelled out there to talk to sources in the French police about that case

and was able to obtain a copy of the French police file into Perepilichnyy's death.

I discovered in the file that detectives had identified Elmira Medynska

as the woman Perepilichnyy had been visiting in Paris.

(JAZZ DRUMS PLAYING)

And so we had a name,

and we had a date of birth for Elmira Medynska,

we knew she was a Ukrainian national.

We didn't know where she was.

That's when I turn to Jane Bradley.

She is our resident super sleuth when it comes to tracking people down.

I started digging into her, and I did all my usual searches -

social media, public records, everything I could think of,

and could find no trace of a woman called Elmira Medynska.

And then I had a breakthrough.

I found a company called Elmira Medins in Spain.

And I thought, "She's using a different name, she's not using her full name."

That then led me to her Facebook, her Instagram...

She'd changed her biography on Instagram

and added a residential address in Paris to her biography.

So I determined, without much thought,

that I would go to this address.

(MYSTERIOUS MUSIC PLAYING)

I set off, I let the team know that I was going in,

and we kind of set up check-ins every ten minutes.

(MYSTERIOUS MUSIC CONTINUES)

I arrived at this huge, great big Parisian apartment block

with an enormous great big hardwood door.

There was a big spiral staircase

that went up about eight stories and I was trudging up,

steps kind of echoing out in this big stone atrium

and got to the top,

and there was Elmira Medynska waiting for me.

She was the tallest woman I have ever seen in my life.

She must have been six foot five or six foot six.

I said to her, "Were you expecting me?"

And she said, "Yes, I was."

And she ushered me into her apartment.

And inside were three men, all wearing suits,

and speaking with, in heavily accented English.

I said I was a journalist and I was there to ask her about a man

she'd spent a couple of nights with in Paris about five years before,

a man called Alexander Perepilichnyy.

And she immediately said, "Of course I know this man."

They had spent these two nights together in Paris.

He'd been very agitated

and clearly frightened during their trip together.

JANE: He seemed really stressed and kept leaving the dinner table.

BILL: The day before he came back to London,

he was sick after having sushi.

HEIDI: And had spent hours throwing up.

(OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING)

(MUSIC FADES OUT ABRUPTLY)

Perepilichnyy's inquest at the time was ongoing,

and the police simply hadn't spoken to Elmira Medynska

about how he'd spent his last two nights.

Perepilichnyy's inquest was heard at the Old Bailey in the heart of London.

And the Old Bailey, for anyone who hasn't stepped inside,

is exactly how you would imagine

an old Victorian, prestigious, historic court to be like.

(COURT CHATTER)

I personally sat through 18 months of that inquest.

I want this verdict to be an informed verdict.

It was, kind of, a race against time

to get Perepilichnyy's story ready.

We wanted to publish it so the judge and all the parties

would have time to properly look into the evidence.

We couldn't sit on information that was germane to that inquest,

so we just had to publish the story.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)

We went first with the Perepilichnyy story.

We'd established through Jason's incredible intelligence sourcing

that there was a document that had been sent to Congress.

US Intelligence officials had gathered intel.

With Perepilichnyy's death there was a high level of confidence

that he was in fact assassinated on orders of Vladimir Putin.

HEIDI: We now had brand new information about the two days before he died.

Our hope with publishing when we did

was that the judge would see this information,

see, ah, there is a physical documentary piece of evidence here

that contains potentially important information

about Perepilichnyy's death.

NEWS REPORTER 7: BuzzFeed have published a series of explosive stories

investigating a number of deaths with links to Russia.

It was a huge relief to finally publish the story.

We'd been working on it for over two years of our lives.

I kind of felt like I had a big flag on my head

for being the troublesome BuzzFeed reporter

who was upending the inquest and causing all sorts of problems.

You know when you walk into a room and you feel half of the room's eyes

glaring at you, hating you for disrupting their inquest,

for the meddling press kind of publishing something that just

blew up the inquest.

And the judge and some of the parties there for the government

just were giving daggers at me.

People were already confused why BuzzFeed was in a courtroom.

They thought we just did cat gifs and lists.

(GAVEL BANGING)

Heidi's interview with Elmira had a huge impact.

The judge scrabbled around to go through our reporting

and figure out what new lines of inquiry were worth pursuing.

He decided there were two lines and that was to interview Elmira Medynska

and also to get the US intelligence report.

HEIDI: Clearly highly pertinent evidence.

That pretty quickly blew up the inquest.

And they had to suspend it while the coroner sought new evidence

off the back of our findings.

NEWS REPORTER 8: Alex Perepilichnyy's inquest will resume next month.

The inquest was upended to try and get answers.

The judge did want to hear this evidence, and it was important.

NEWS REPORTER 9: Elmira Medynska was never interviewed by Surrey Police.

The details of what happened in Paris only came out much later

when she spoke to BuzzFeed and then the inquest into his death.

One of the key theories being investigated

was whether or not he was poisoned.

Here we have this witness who the police didn't bother to interview,

who is now telling a court that he spent one of his last nights alive throwing up.

This evidence wouldn't have been heard

if we hadn't tracked down Elmira in Paris and told her story.

It's difficult to make these cases stick in court.

(OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING)

At the inquest, Monique Simmonds said it wasn't possible

to say that the substance she'd detected was Gelsemium.

We were asked specifically to confirm whether this ion

was or was not from the Gelsemium.

So when we went back to check on this,

we could not find an ion that was similar.

We had no evidence that it contained the alkaloids from Gelsemium.

She said, along with the other toxicologist,

there were other tests they would've liked to carry out

to definitively find out what it was, but they couldn't

because the pathologist threw away the majority of his stomach contents

and that really limited the amount of toxicology tests

that could be carried out.

It's one of the many features of investigating this pattern of suspicious deaths

that makes it quite difficult to get to the truth.

Do you have faith in this inquest as it is to get to the truth?

There is so much information that's still not been ventilated,

so many requests that we've made for further investigation actions

which have not been approved.

I felt very conscious as we went about our work

of the threats that journalists around the world,

and particularly in Russia,

face on a daily basis, as they go after the truth.

WOMAN: A couple of us were living away from home

in these secure locations we'd been put in.

Weird things started happening to a few of us -

cars outside our house,

things being moved around in one of our apartments.

Then you start to think,

"Has this person been behind me for a long time? Are they following me?"

This was a really chilling investigation

to work on a story where you feel threatened.

The kind of level of understanding that's given me,

I think, doesn't go away.

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

(MUSIC FADES OUT ABRUPTLY)

(TOURIST CHATTER)

This has been a detailed and exhaustive process

in which the coroner has examined all of the available evidence,

and has returned a verdict of natural causes.

This supports the conclusion reached by Surrey Police in 2013

following a full investigation, which included two post mortems

and a very extensive range of toxicology tests.

The thing that baffled me about the inquest verdict

was how you can say someone died,

likely died of natural causes,

without finding any natural cause of death.

Today, Putin will be celebrating this result.

I mean, just every step of the way, this was just keystone cops.

There is huge circumstantial evidence

that Putin sent his assassins here.

If the police had investigated properly, there would've been a different result.

I'm satisfied that the investigation

was conducted to the best of its ability

based on what was known at the time and the evidence available.

There weren't any external factors involved,

and that's the conclusion that the Coroner came to as well.

That it was probably natural causes.

If people want to say the Perepilichnyy case was innocent

and it was a heart attack, fine.

Why was some of the evidence heard behind closed doors?

You don't do that in an average heart attack case.

If I went out and ate some bad sushi and keeled over,

there's no way on Earth that in my inquest there'd be 'closed evidence'

that was withheld for 'national security reasons.'

(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)

HEIDI: The British authorities had to be held to account

for their failure to act on the evidence that we'd already uncovered

that Russia may have been conducting an escalating campaign

of targeted assassination on British soil.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC INTENSIFIES)

(MUSIC STOPS, BIRDS CHIRPING)

Everything what they're writing is wrong.

It's false information, it's disinformation.

It's deception. It's not true what they're writing.

If somebody wants to give an interview,

like I'm doing right now,

it does not mean that he automatically

becomes a potential victim for the Russian intelligence services.

No, this is not true.

And if I am walking out of this room now

and something happens to me like an automobile accident

or I'm getting poisoned with bad fish,

something because I love sushi, OK?

That does not mean that the Russian intelligence is involved.

But of course, BuzzFeed can make an investigation and say, look,

he's a former special operations officer.

He's living in this country. He's giving interviews.

And this is very natural and obvious

that the Russians were on him for a long time

because he's publishing books, articles and doing private investigations

for private British companies.

And that it's natural that he was dealt with

by Secret Service, which is not true.

(OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING)

The funny thing is, right,

people were, like, disbelieving of what we'd done.

And then all of a sudden,

this bulletin goes through newsrooms,

there's been some kind of event in Salisbury.

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

And literally...

..it changed.

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