The daughter of a Peruvian woman and a German, abandoned by her parents in Moscow, became a socialite in Italy and made connections with NATO officers.
A woman with a passport named Maria Rivera became a socialite in Italy and was a member of NATO circles. After the Skripal poisoning was revealed in 2018, she returned to Russia, according to Bellingcat investigator Elliot Higgins.
The woman with a passport named Maria Adela Kufeldt Rivera is the love child of a German father and a Peruvian mother. She was born in Peru and was abandoned by her mother in Moscow during the 1980 Olympic Games. She was raised by foster parents.
When Maria grew up, she moved to the West and became a socialite in Italy. She had boutiques that sold jewelry. She actively established contacts with NATO officers who served in Italy.
After the exposure of the participants in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in 2018, she disappeared. Then she announced on social media that she was fighting cancer.
In fact, she returned to Russia, according to an investigation published on Friday, August 26 by Bellingcat journalists.
As investigators found out , in 2006 this woman received a Russian passport under the name Maria Adela Kufeldt Rivera, moreover, this passport was from the same series as that of the GRU officers who are associated with the poisoning of Skripal and the Bulgarian gunsmith Omelyan Gebrev.
A year earlier, a woman with the same name and date birth tried to obtain Peruvian citizenship in the country's capital, Lima, but was denied because a false baptismal certificate was found among her documents.
In 2013, Rivera registered the jewelry brand Serein in Italy “with more than 200 years of history” and opened a jewelry boutique in Naples. Investigators discovered that the exhibited jewelry with enamel could be bought in Chinese online stores for 11-18 euros.
Rivera organized social evenings in Naples, and in 2015 she became the secretary of the local branch of the Lion's Club charity organization, created NATO officers quartered in Naples. According to the interlocutors of the journalists, Rivera “attended all the events”, “made friends with a number of officers and often communicated with them on social networks, and some of these connections were clearly romantic.”
Several of Rivera's acquaintances, with whom journalists spoke, called her legend “confused and unconvincing” and assured that they did not discuss politics with her.
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In the fall of 2018, when Bellingcat and Insider named those accused of poisoning Skripal as GRU officers and published data their passports with distinctive series and numbers, Rivera returned to Russia. Investigators claim that she currently lives under the name Olga Kolobova and works in a pension fund.
