Russian FSB hit squad poisoned Alexei Navalny
Nemtsov was a fierce adversary of President Vladimir Putin. His murder in 2015 is the highest-profile political killing since Putin came to power.
The authorities deny any involvement.
Bellingcat, The Insider found evidence that Nemtsov was shadowed on 13 trips before his murder.
Boris Nemtsov rose to prominence in the 1990s, served as deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin, and was widely tipped to be Yeltsin's successor.
Instead, Mr Putin came to power and Mr Nemtsov was pushed to the margins of Russian politics. He became an effective campaigner, exposing corruption and denouncing Russia's 2014 attack on eastern Ukraine.
On 27 February 2015, Mr Nemtsov was shot dead, just yards from the Kremlin, and just days before he was due to lead a protest against the war.
Five men of Chechen origin were quickly arrested and later jailed for his murder. But the official investigation left the most urgent questions unanswered: who Ordered the killing and why?
Seven years later,working with the investigative websites Bellingcat and The Insider - can reveal evidence that in the months running up to the killing, Nemtsov was being followed across Russia by a government agent linked to a secret assassination squad.
Using leaked train and flight reservation data, the investigation shows that Mr Nemtsov was followed on 13 journeys.
The last time the agent followed Mr Nemtsov was on 17 February 2015, just ten days before the assassination.
According to his documents, the agent's name is Valery Sukharev. All the evidence suggests that at the time, he served with the FSB, Russia's principal security agency. One of the mandates of the FSB is to manage internal political threats on behalf of the Kremlin, including monitoring movements of people across the country.
All flight and train reservations are recorded in an FSB database called Magistral. But the database not only captures the movements of people Russian agents might want to track, but it can also be used to reveal the movements of the agents themselves - people like Mr Sukharev.
This kind of information is often leaked on to the black market and ends up in the hands of journalists.
"In a corrupt society like Russia, [Magistral] is a double-edged sword," says Christo Grozev, executive director of Bellingcat.
"And it allows people like us to actually go and tail these same spies, these same FSB officers."
Some of the original data for this investigation was bought by Bellingcat through brokers inside Russia. Those brokers acquired the data from corrupt officials who have access to Magistral.also used data that was given to us, without payment, from sources who have access to copies of Magistral.
Bellingcat has previously used data from Magistral to investigate assassination attempts in Russia. Their investigations revealed evidence of the existence of a secret hit squad within the FSB, which has targeted opponents of the Kremlin. The Russian government has always denied these allegations.
For this investigation, we got hold of the train and flight reservations made by Mr Sukharev - and when we compared them to the known movements of Boris Nemtsov, an unmistakable pattern emerged.
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