Police hope a hefty reward will help solve the murder of former KGB Colonel Gennadi Bernovski, who died in a hail of bullets outside his Gold Coast home.

November 15, 2018

Police hope a $250,000 reward will finally smoke out the killer of former KGB Colonel Gennadi Bernovski, who died in a hail of bullets outside his luxury Gold Coast home 18 years ago.

Mr Bernovski was raked with semi-automatic gunfire as he took out his bins on the night of July 25, 2000.

The 41-year-old martial arts expert died after staggering back to the doorway of his Benowa Waters home, telling his wife: “Call the police, there’s shooting.”

Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan hopes the reward will be an incentive for anyone who knows who killed Mr Bernovski to come forward.

He wants the dead man’s family to finally get the closure “they deserve”.

“We need to deliver justice for Mr Bernovski and his family and friends,” he said.

“But also, equally importantly, we need to ensure that … those who commit crimes are held to account and bought before the courts,” he told reporters on Thursday.

The murder sparked fears of a Russian mafia expansion in Australia but that community is no longer the focus of the investigation.

Homicide detectives have established that before coming to Australia Mr Bernovski had risen quickly through the ranks of the Russian Army and was a colonel in an elite, SAS-style military unit of the KGB.

In the two years after his murder, police exhausted mafia-related leads and found no “untoward” activities by Mr Bernovski before his death.

Detectives then formed the view the crime was more likely related to a dispute between two old comrades over a lost fortune.

At the time, the search for a motive led to Russian businessman Oleg Kouzmine, who had arrived in Australia in 1998 with $1.3 million from “dubious” origins, according to police involved in the initial investigation.

Mr Bernovski had introduced Mr Kouzmine to investments in a small goods company on the Gold Coast and a secondhand car broking service but both ventures failed.

Police said Mr Kouzmine lost all his money and made it know he blamed Mr Bernovski.

Mr Kouzmine became the prime suspect when his fingerprints were discovered on a gate at the Bernovski home.

During his police interview, Mr Kouzmine said he had no idea who killed Mr Bernovski. The next day he left for Russia to visit family, promising to speak with police when he returned in a few weeks.

But he did not come back.

Australian police issued a warrant for Mr Kouzmine’s arrest in 2003 but the lack of an extradition treaty meant he was never returned.

Det Insp Hogan says cold case detectives reopened the case six months ago after a review.

It has been almost 20 years, the people involved are getting older so we thought it was timely to reopen the case and see if we can solve it, he said.