Moscow’s spy chief has said a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine and was reportedly found shot dead in an underground garage in Spain last week was a “moral corpse” when he planned his crimes. “This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse at the very moment when he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” Sergei Naryshkin, the powerful director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, told Russian media when asked about the pilot Maksim Kuzminov. “In Russia, it is customary to speak good of the dead or nothing at all,” Naryshkin added. Spanish police on Tuesday confirmed they suspected the body of a man found on 13 February in the town of Villajoyosa, near Alicante in southern Spain, belonged to Kuzminov, who had landed in Ukraine with his Mi-8 helicopter last August. Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence on Monday said Kuzminov had been found dead in Spain. Kuzminov crossed the frontline in an Mi-8 helicopter last August while on a flight between two Russian airbases. According to Ukrainian intelligence services, Kuzminov contacted Ukrainian agents in December 2022, saying he wanted to defect in exchange for a large monetary reward and a new life for his family in Ukraine. He was awarded the equivalent of $500,000 (£396,000) to relocate to Ukraine. The Spanish Civil Guard said it found false documents on a body, which identified the man as a 33-year-old Ukrainian, though with a different name. It is believed Kuzminov was residing in Spain with a Ukrainian passport under a new name. Spain’s state news agency, EFE, reported the body had been hit by half a dozen bullets and was run over by the car used by the attackers. Spanish media said investigators were searching for two suspects who had fled in a vehicle that was later found burnt out in a nearby town. Kuzminov’s defection to Ukraine was presented last year as a major PR coup for Kyiv and the pilot appeared last September at a high-profile press conference in Kyiv flanked by two uniformed Ukrainian service personnel. If Kuzminov’s killing is confirmed, the finger of blame probably points at the Kremlin. Russian security services have been behind a string of assassinations against Kremlin enemies on European soil. In 2018, two officers from Russia’s GRU military intelligence outfit allegedly tried to kill the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in the UK. And in 2021, a German judge accused Russia of state terrorism over the murder in Berlin’s Tiergarten of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, an ethnic Chechen of Georgian citizenship who commanded a militia in Chechnya’s war seeking independence from Russia in the 2000s.