Just past a bayside road bend, still within earshot of the waves of the English Channel, a dirt path marked “STRICTLY NO VEHICLES” opens into dense woodland. On a crisp January morning, a local man was walking his dog here when a strange sight stopped him dead in his tracks. The burned-out husk of a Volvo was sunk into the wet mud, surrounded by a shadow of ash. When police arrived and peered inside, they found a shotgun – and a pile of charred human bones.

The bones belonged to Mikus Alps, a 33-year-old Latvian mechanic who moonlighted in the war for eastern Ukraine, smuggling military equipment thousands of miles in support of Ukrainian volunteer fighters battling pro-Russian forces.

Within hours of the discovery, a Ukrainian commander had declared Alps a martyr and blamed the Kremlin for his death — “I have no doubt that this was the Muscovites” — sparking international speculation. “It appears Russia just assassinated someone in a British crown territory,” ran the headline in the Washington Examiner. “Kremlin killed my comrade in Guernsey fireball to make it look like suicide,” blared the story in Britain’s Daily Mirror.

BuzzFeed News travelled to Guernsey — a British Crown dependency — to dig deeper. We spoke to a dozen people who knew Alps — five Ukrainian fighters and seven local friends in Guernsey — reviewed some of his last text messages, and obtained exclusive photographs of his activities in Ukraine to reconstruct the weeks before he vanished. The resulting picture is far murkier than the headlines first suggested.

While friends in Guernsey and Ukraine believe Alps was murdered over his activities in Ukraine, a source close to the police investigation told BuzzFeed News that there is no evidence of any third-party involvement in his death. Alps was acting oddly before his disappearance: He declared suddenly that he was going to sell his businesses, sent texts saying he was feeling depressed, and posted a plaintive letter to his tattoo artist appearing to foretell his own demise: “If you’re reading this I am probably in a better place”.

Friends said he had also received threats in the days before his death. Three of his Ukrainian comrades, still locked in war against their Kremlin-backed enemies, told BuzzFeed News that Alps spoke of menacing messages connected to his work in Ukraine – and one claimed the Guernsey police did not contact him when he reached out after Alps died to offer information via an intermediary. Police declined to comment on this. A source close to the investigation said officers “are aware that he received negative comments online” from Russian accounts but said they had seen nothing linking these or any other threats to his death.