Here’s How Nemtsov’s Killers Could Be Caught

Some grainy, partly obstructed footage of Boris Nemtsov’s assassination has been leaked to the Russian television channel TV Center which bravely broadcast it. It doesn’t show a lot, but it does show enough to establish some of the basics of what happened. Enough is visible that it prevents Putin from getting away with a completely concocted version of events. For example police publicized that they were looking for a white car, but the car seen in the video picking up the assassin and driving off is dark.

The murder happened while Nemtsov and his girlfriend Anna Duritska were walking south from Red Square towards Balchug Island, which lies in the middle of the Moskva River. The footage appears to be taken from a camera mounted on the outside of an upper floor of the Balchug Kempinski Hotel.

Two blurry figures that must be Nemtsov and Duritska can be seen walking on the west sidewalk of the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge. Some kind of municipal utility vehicle slowly catches up to them as they cross behind a large light pole, and the murder apparently happens right at the moment it pulls alongside them. Two seconds later a figure emerges from behind the truck and walks out into the middle of the road, gets in the passenger door of a car that was driving up from the same direction, and they drive away.

The utility truck stops as Duritska kneels over Nemtsov. Then she walks over to the truck driver apparently to ask for help. Other people arrive, the truck driver leaves, Duritska and two others walk around the area together, and finally a police car arrives.

There’s a lot of speculation going around about the role of the truck and how the assassin arrived on the scene without being visible. Some have assumed everything was carefully coordinated to hide the killing from the camera, but this was a very far-off camera. My guess is the assassin was standing near the light pole where Nemtsov was shot down, invisible to the camera, and the truck was not involved.

But there’s a way we could find out for certain, if anybody has the guts to do it. There were several cameras located much nearer to the scene where Nemtsov was gunned down, on at least two nearby lamp posts. Everything possible needs to be done to make the footage they captured public.

One, pictured at the top of this article, has a large traffic camera (click for Google street view) pointing north towards the scene of the crime from about 120 meters to the south. Its view of the killing was likely blocked by the truck, but it probably recorded the assassin arriving at the scene of the crime. Unless it was broken or turned off it should have better images of the assassin stepping into the getaway car, and it should have excellent footage of the getaway car driving directly towards and under it.

The other post is about 60 meters north of the crime scene and has this set of cameras on it (click for Google street view):

Which tells you something about the nature of the killers. It seems very unlikely that they carefully planned to hide from a distant camera but didn’t mind being caught from shorter range on a big traffic camera and probably at least one of these cameras. Duritska is reportedly being held against her will in an undisclosed location, and Ukrainian officials pressing for her release probably won't get anywhere without US backing.

It surely won’t be easy to find that traffic camera footage. I understand of course that most Russians are either understandably too scared of Putin to act against him or stupidly glad that Putin is killing Ukrainians and Russian opposition leaders. Anyone who really cares about Russia’s future should be doing their utmost to make that footage public and get Duritska out of Russia.