close friend of Boris Berezovsky, who from November 2000 resided in Britain; Berezovsky had to give up his ownership of the ORT TV channel, transferred to Roman Abramovich's Sibneft) in exchange for the promise to release Glushkov, which was not fulfilled. In April 2001, Andrey Lugovoy organised an "escape" of Glushkov from a hospital where he was kept by authorities. According to Glushkov, that was a set-up by FSB. He had no intention of escaping and "was walking in his slippers to the hospital gate to go home for the night, with his guards' knowledge, as he had done a few days earlier". During his trial, Glushkov was incarcerated in Lefortovo Prison. He was cleared of the original fraud and money laundering charges by the court in March 2004, but found guilty of attempted escape and "abuse of authority" and sentenced to 3 years and 3 months of imprisonment. Glushkov was released in the courtroom, since he had already served his sentence in the pre-trial detention centre. The Moscow City Court rejected the verdict and returned the case for new consideration. In 2006, the Savelovsky District Court terminated the prosecution of Glushkov, and gave him a two-year suspended sentence. Emigration to UK and extradition request Gluskov emigrated to the UK and received political asylum in 2010. The Russian state resumed his criminal prosecution. In 2017, during a trial in absentia in Russia, Glushkov was sentenced to eight years in prison for allegedly stealing $123 million from Aeroflot. The UK refused to extradite him to Russia. Death On 13 March 2018, friends of Glushkov revealed that he had been found dead the night before in his home in New Malden, London. His death was initially treated by police as unexplained and came a week after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, which along with his reputation as a critic of the Putin government, was said to be the reason for putting the Counter Terrorism Command in charge of the investigation. Glushkov reportedly feared being on Putin's hit list and expected to be a likely target. During the subsequent post-mortem his body was found to have marks consistent with strangulation on the neck. On 16 March 2018, the Metropolitan Police stated they were now treating his death as murder and that "at this stage there is nothing to suggest any link to the attempted murders in Salisbury". Counter-terrorism investigators