BuzzFeed has filed a lawsuit aiming to force US authorities to release documents related to the death of Mikhail Lesin, former CEO of Gazprom Media, who was found dead at a hotel two years ago.

Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was murdered in Washington, DC, on the eve of a planned meeting with the US Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death, BuzzFeed writes.

Mikhail Lesin’s battered body was discovered in his Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015, with blunt-force injuries to the head, neck, and torso. After an almost yearlong "comprehensive investigation," a federal prosecutor announced last October that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” His death was ruled an "accident," and prosecutors closed the case.

But the two FBI agents — as well as a third agent and a serving US intelligence officer — said Lesin was actually bludgeoned to death. None of these officials were directly involved in the government’s investigation, but they said they learned about it from colleagues who were.

“Lesin was beaten to death,” one of the FBI agents said. “I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can't get into.”
In another previously unreported revelation, the two FBI agents said it was the Department of Justice that paid for the hotel room where Lesin died. DOJ officials had invited the Russian to Washington to interview him about the inner workings of RT, the Kremlin-funded network that Lesin founded, they said.
But Lesin never made it to the interview. He died the night before it was scheduled to take place.

CEETV reminds that a yer ago opposition leader Alexey Navalny found out that there is a connection between the Panama Papers and Lesin’s death. Mikhail Lesin, the founder of Video International, at least had to know that Vladimir Putin was a major shareholder in his company and how money came to it, according to Navalny.

An interesting detail published by The Guardian states that the President’s sidekicks became nervous in 2012 and stopped using the Panama offshores. All financial machinations were transferred from Panama to the British Virgin Islands. The new offshore, according to the journalists, was connected to Lesin’s companies.