A Russian official linked to attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with senior members of President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team, has died in a helicopter crash, The Daily Beast reports.
Russian Deputy Attorney General Saak Albertovich Karapetyan, 58, died Wednesday night after his helicopter crashed during an unauthorized flight in the Kostroma region of Russia, northeast of Moscow, near the village of Vonyshevo. The pilot, Stanislav Mikhnov, 54, and a third man, Arek Harutyunyan, died in the crash as well, according to Russian news service Interfax.
According to the Daily Beast, Karapetyan “was intimately familiar with some of the most notorious operations carried out under the orders of [Russian President] Vladimir Putin,” and “has been involved in efforts to foil international investigations for more than a decade.”
Veselnitskaya helped Karapetyan draft a document that was sent along with a letter from the Russian government informing the U.S. that it would not help in a civil case related to the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. A Swiss court uncovered their connection after finding that a former leading investigator who had engaged in “unauthorized clandestine behavior” had met with Karapetyan in Zurich and Geneva, and that Karapetyan had invited the investigator to Moscow for a meeting with Veselnitskaya in a luxury hotel.
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