A man arrested on Tuesday in Thessaloniki as a suspect in connection with the 1997 murder of Russian hitman Alexander Solonik and his girlfriend Svetlana Kotova is a case of mistaken identity, police said on Thursday.
The Greek police said the confusion arose from the fact that the man listed on an international warrant for Solonik's murder shared the same identification data with the man arrested at the Thessaloniki International Airport "Makedonia", except for the birth date.
The arrested man has been on police databases but for issues related to narcotics, and he was arrested after a tip from Interpol Cyprus that a man sought for the double murder of 1997 had departed Larnaca airport for Thessaloniki. Police notified the prosecutor, who ordered his release as he has no pending issues in Greece.
Solonik, who was included in Russia's top ten most wanted list, was found strangled on February 2, 1997, in a forest at the northern Athens suburb of Varibobi, near the Athens-Lamia national motorway. The dismembered body of Kotova, one of Russia’s top models and former Miss Russia, was found a few months later in a shallow grave under an olive tree, close to a villa rented by Solonik at the Attica coastal town of Lagonissi.