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I don't remember any prominent consulate killing during the cold war as a fan of John le Carré novels. Maybe they were covered by Soviets and the West?

Are there any other examples of consular services being used to trap and punish opposition, except the Saudi Khashoggi case in Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate?

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The Dikko affair, where the Mossad working for Nigeria attempted to kidnap a dissident in London and ship him back to Nigeria in a diplomatic parcel, comes to mind. The plot fell apart, but he would almost certainly have been killed if they had succeeded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dikko_affair

Not directly at a consulate, that I can recall, but having consular officials on diplomatic status in an adversary nation who are actually intelligence agency operatives was, and is, a pretty commonplace practice.

They had resources to kill or kidnap their targets in a way that creates much less problems than a murder in a consulate.

I rather suspect a bloody pulp-fiction-esque accident a la Tarantino at the consulate.

34 years ago Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher was murdered by shots fired from the Libyan embassy in London:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yvonne_Fletcher

Apparently they didn't bother to do that in a consulate. Come to think of it, Putin doesn't seem to bother with such pretenses right now. The Skripal suspects didn't even have diplomatic identities...

It's the other way. The Saudis didn't bother to do that in a way that at least gives the perpetrators plausible deniability.

Putin's thugs at least put some effort to cover their tracks.

They may have overestimated their ability to convince people he left the consulate. They may have tried to detain and abduct him. Maybe they even needed some valuable information from him and he died under torture.

There are a lot of possible explanations beyond simply "they lured him to the consolate to kill him". Most of these explanations aren't a whole lot better than that, but these would explain why this all looks so chaotic or amateurish.

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