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The Justice Department unsealed charges against five alleged Russian intelligence operatives accused of running a global assassination network, including a plot this summer to kill a dissident whom investigators say the network believed was residing just outside Washington, D.C.
- Prosecutors say Suarez, a Cuban national, and Castro, who is Venezuelan, ran the recruitment from inside Russia, reaching out to a Venezuelan immigrant settled in Brooklyn to handle surveillance and later look for someone willing to carry out the killing.
- That recruit was offered between $1,000 and $1,500 for surveillance footage and up to $40,000 to make the target vanish, yet he refused to pull the trigger himself.
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A strikingly similar scheme unfolded in 2025 in Lithuania, where a U.S. citizen pocketed $200 for photographing a dissident's home before turning down a $25,000 offer to kill him.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have accused five people tied to Russian intelligence services of running an assassination operation with reach into several countries, one that this year allegedly extended to the outskirts of the U.S. capital, according to an indictment made public Tuesday by federal prosecutors in New York. All five defendants remain at large and are presumed innocent unless convicted.
