Two days after a fellow Russian he was traveling with was discovered dead in the same hotel, a wealthy businessman and local politician from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party committed himself by jumping from a hotel window in India over the weekend.
Pavel Antov, 65, who ranked first on Forbes’ list of the wealthiest Russian parliamentarians in 2019, now joins the expanding list of notable Russians who have been mysteriously murdered.
Pavel Antov cause of death: How did Pavel Antov fall from hotel?
Antov’s lifeless body was discovered in front of his hotel on Saturday in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, according to the Russian channel Zebra-TV.
Antov was on holiday in India with a group of tourists when, according to local authorities, he went out the window. Antov was a politician from Russia’s Vladimir area and the founder and vice president of the wildly successful Vladimir Standard meat company.
Antov harshly denounced Russia’s attacks on Ukraine over the summer in a message shared on social media.
Strangely, officials at the Russian Consulate General in Kolkata claim that police do not believe the “tragic occurrences” at the hotel have any “criminal component.”
In a post on Telegram, Vyacheslav Kartukhin, the vice speaker of the Vladimir regional parliament, used the same terminology to characterize Antov’s passing and attributed it to “tragic circumstances.”
