LONDON
— A British coroner said Thursday that he could not establish whether
the mysterious death of Boris A. Berezovsky, a businessman and power
broker from Russia, was suicide or homicide.
“I
am not saying Mr. Berezovsky took his own life,” said the coroner,
Peter Bedford. “I am not saying Mr. Berezovsky was unlawfully killed.
What I am saying is that the burden of proof sets such a high standard,
it is impossible for me to say.”
The
unusual open verdict seemed to offer an aptly enigmatic epitaph for Mr.
Berezovsky, a onetime mathematics professor who lived a life of
intrigue and drama in Russia from the breakup of the Soviet Union, when
he acquired great wealth, until 2000, when he fell afoul of President
Vladimir V. Putin and fled into self-exile in London.
From
here, he mounted a sustained political campaign against Mr. Putin until
2013, when he was found dead in a locked bathroom at a luxury home
outside London belonging to a former wife, Galina Besharova.
Speculative
theories have swirled around Mr. Berezovsky’s death ever since, not
least because one of his close associates, the former K.G.B. officer
Alexander V. Litvinenko, died in 2006 after being poisoned with a rare
radioactive isotope, polonium 210.
According
to some witnesses at the coroner’s inquest, Mr. Berezovsky fell into
despair after a court rejected his claim for $5.1 billion in
compensation against a former protégé, the billionaire Roman A.
Abramovich, who owns the Chelsea soccer club in London and a number of
other prominent assets and is on good terms with the Kremlin.
Mr.
Bedford said it was “clear to me and the witnesses I have heard” that
the defeat in court shook Mr. Berezovsky, having “a significant effect
not only on his finances but also on his mental health.” One of the
witnesses was his daughter, Elizaveta Berezovskaya, who said at the
inquest on Thursday, “It was obvious to me that the cause of my father’s
death was deep depression and severe suffering.”
Police
officers and government forensic experts testified at the inquest that
they knew of no evidence indicating that Mr. Berezovsky had been
murdered.
But
Bernd Brinkmann, a German professor specializing in hanging and
asphyxiation cases, said at the inquest on Thursday that he believed two
people had to have been involved in the death. He suggested that Mr.
Berezovsky might have been attacked in a bedroom before his body was
moved to the locked bathroom.
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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