On 23rd of August 2019 a man was shot three times in the head at Tiergarten Park, Berlin in broad daylight. The victim was 40-year-old Zemlikhan Khangoshvili who had fought during the Second Chechen war of the early 2000s. He had left Chechnya for Georgia in 2004 and after an attempted murder in Tbilisi he fled to Ukraine, Poland and eventually Germany where he applied to asylum due to political persecution.
The offender approached Khangoshvili on a bicycle that he would later throw into the Spree River, changed his outfit and shaved his beard to blend into a crowd of tourists as witnesses recall. Nevertheless, he was identified as Vadim Krasikov. Investigations, which were facilitated by the watchdog Bellingcat, revealed that Krasikov had connections to the Russian Security Service and had committed similar murders, causing a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Germany. Though there have been several cases of violence of Chechens and political enemies in exile, the murder in bright daylight showed the boldness with which the Russian regime is persecuting dissidents.