Russian oligarch’s girlfriend casts doubts on suicide claim

MOSCOW - Agence France-Presse

Berezovsky is seen in front of court in this file photo. His girlfriend said she can’t believe that he killed himself. AP photo

The 23-year-old girlfriend of the late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky said today that she did not believe he had killed himself and that they had been planning to go to Israel on holiday together days after he was found dead.

In an interview with New Times, Katerina Sabirova said she did not believe Berezovsky, 67, whom she first met four years ago, would have killed himself, and that in their last conversation a day before his death, his voice “had sounded better than usual.”

Berezovsky was found on March 23 in the bathroom of a mansion outside London and a postmortem found that he had been hanged and no evidence of a struggle.

“He was definitely planning to come to Israel on Monday (March 25),” she said and showed a printout of her air ticket to Tel Aviv. “He had big plans” of going to the

Dead Sea, she said, adding that he had been down but that she had not believed he was suicidal.

Berezovsky “used to say: ‘Imagine if I’m not around, all the problems will go away,’ but this wasn’t a guide to action, I could not and cannot imagine that he could do this,” Sabirova said.