On the 12th of March, 2018, Nikolai Glushkov (68) was found dead at his home in Clarence Avenue, New Malden. Nikolai was discovered by his daughter, who described the scene as 'a trashy set-up of a suicide.' Nikolai was described as a “charismatic and vibrant energy ball” who was positive and incapable of harming himself.The cause of death was determined to be strangulation and there was no sign of forced entry at the property.
Nikolay Glushkov (spelled Nikolai / Nikolay in different sources) had been granted political asylum in the UK in 2004, and he was a prominent critic of the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin. He was due to appear the next day in the high court to defend himself in a case against him against the Russian state airline Aeroflot, for whom he'd previously worked.
Nokolai's daughter said she last spoke to her father at 9pm on Sunday the11th of March. “I asked him how he was feeling. He said: ‘I’m prepared. I’m fired up and I’m winning.’ I said: ‘Stay brave. Best of luck. Love you.’”
Natalia, Nikolai's daughter called her father at 20:00 the next day to see how the hearing had gone. There was no reply. She tried his other devices – and then set off for his house in Clarence Avenue, arriving about 10pm. “I had a key. I opened the door. I knew [immediately] he was dead,” she said.“I could see some traces of physical harm done to him. The picture was so trashy. It looked like a cheap set up of a suicide. My father was a kind soul, always positive, and a very refined person. I had never seen any sort of depression in him.”
Nikolay's murder allegedly bore the hallmarks of a contract killing. Natalia said that whomever killed her father entered his terrace house without breaking or damaging the door. Nikolai lived alone with a large ridgeback dog. It appears not to have barked – something Natalia described as “weird”. “The dog was extremely protective of Dad,” she said.
Interestingly, this murder occured just a couple of weeks after the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, themselves critial of Russia. Nikolai was also close friends with fellow Russian exile Boris Berezovsky who was found dead via hanging in 2013.