Former Officer Behind 1999 Apartment Bombings Probe in Custody Again

MosNews
Sep. 18, 2005

Former FSB officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, was taken in custody Sunday after a Russian court overturned his early release. Trepashkin had won support of human rights activist for his efforts to investigate alleged government complicity in the country’s 1999 apartment bombings that claimed over 200 lives.

Former FSB officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, was taken in custody Sunday after a Russian court overturned his early release, his wife informed the Interfax news agency.

On Sunday morning Trepashkin himself told Interfax that his house was surrounded by some 20 police officers who had arrived there to arrest him.

On Friday, Mikhail Trepashkin, sentenced earlier to four years in prison for possessing an unregistered weapon and disclosing state secrets, was ordered by the Sverdlov regional court to remains in custody, after the prosecutor’s office protested a lower court ruling to release him on parole, his lawyer, Yelena Liptser said.

In late August, a Nizhny Tagil court ordered the release of the former FSB officer on parole.

Trepashkin and his supporters said that the charges against him were politically motivated — the former FSB agent led a lone investigation into the 1999 apartment bombings that were blamed on Chechen separatists.

Trepashkin’s supporters said his only crime was to have exposed evidence that pointed to government complicity in the killing of more than a hundred civilians during the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow. Shortly before he was due to present his evidence in court, police stopped him on the road and claimed they found a gun in the trunk of his car.

On Sunday, Trepashkin’s lawyers denounced their client’s arrest saying that by overturning an earlier sentence the higher court had not, however, sanctioned his arrest but merely ordered a retrial of his case.

Pending retrial Trepashkin was to stay at large, Yelena Liptser told Interfax.