Russia's foreign intelligence chief said this morning that a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine and was found shot dead in an underground garage in Spain last week was a "moral corpse" when he planned his crimes, Russian news agencies reported.
Spain's state news agency EFE reported that a body found on Feb. 13 in the town of Villajoyosa, near Alicante in southern Spain, belonged to pilot Maxim Kuzminov, who had landed in Ukraine with his Mi-8 helicopter last August.
"In Russia it is customary to speak either good of the dead or nothing at all," Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), was quoted as saying when asked about Kuzminov.
"This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse at the very moment when he planned his dirty and terrible crime," Naryshkin was quoted as saying by TASS news agency.
Kuzminov's defection to Ukraine was presented last year as a major coup for Kyiv.
He had been living in Spain with a Ukrainian passport under a different name, EFE said. Ukraine's Ukrainska Pravda newspaper reported that Kuzminov had been found shot dead.