Suspect in Litvinenko Case Hospitalized…More Developments
The LAT reports online:
Russia’s chief prosecutor said Tuesday that a key potential suspect in the poisoning death of dissident former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko has been hospitalized, and that British investigators would be allowed to see him only if doctors grant approval.
The person of interest is Andrei Lugovoy, a former FSB agent, suspected by authorities and Litvinenko (prior to his death) to have been involved in the radiation poisoning. This man has an interesting past and was one of the last to see Litvinenko before he became ill. Axis News has put together a good profile of Lugovoy.
Bartering…not in rubles, but bodies
(namely Berezovsky and Zakayev)
Meanwhile, The Times reports that Russia has sought to use the strong British interest in solving Litvinenko’s murder as a means of bartering for the return of anti-Kremlin dissidents who have taken refuge in the UK. Among the dozens of wanted expat Russians living in Britain, tycoon Boris Berezovsky and Chechen sepratist emissary Akhmed Zakayev remain on the top of the Kremlin’s wish list. Russia’s general prosector seems confident that 10 Downing Street will come to it’s senses and hand over Berezovsky and Zakayev…eventually.
The Amazing Trepashkin
Another former FSB agent to have caught the eye of Scotland Yard is Mikhail Trepashkin, who is currently serving a jail term in Russia for divulging state secrets (and illegal possession of a weapon?). At a press conference on Monday in Moscow, Yelena Lipster, a lawyer for Trepashkin, said the jailed former FSB agent wanted to give information that he had surrounding Litvinenko’s death to British authorities.
“He (Trepashkin) warned Litvinenko, among other things, of events that later materialized,” Yelena Liptser told a news conference. “And now he is ready to give evidence to the British security services, and we believe his evidence should be heard.”
Not happening. The Russian authorities have denied outside access to Trepashkin and have pledged that they will be the only ones interviewing him. Considering his past expriences with Kremlin prosecutors, how this might play out for Trepashkin (and Scotland Yard’s investigation) is anyone’s guess. What we do know is that leverage over the Brits is mounting for the Kremlin.
Is Trepashkin ‘the whistleblower’ looking to blow it again?
Some believe that Trepashkin was unlawfully detained and prosecuted because he was going to blow the whistle on some very uncomfortable state secrets regarding the 1999 apartment block explosions that kicked off the second Chechen war. Aleksandr Goldfarb, the Civil Liberties Fund deputy chairman, told Ekho Moskvy radio at the time of Trepashkin’s trial in 2003 that the charges lobbed against him were bogus.
“The International Commission of Jurists believes that the case against Trepashkin has been fabricated and the actual essence of the persecution against him is linked with his being a legal expert to the public commission on investigating the [1999] explosions in apartment blocks in Moscow and a lawyer representing one of the victims,” Goldfarb said. The International Commission of Jurists is sure that the aim of Trepashkin’s prosecution is “not to allow his participation in the trial on the explosions, where he intended to raise the question of the possible involvement of the Russian special services with the September 1999 explosions in Moscow,” Goldfarb added (Source: Ekho Moskvy news agency, Moscow, in Russian, 12/15/03).
Would any information extracted from Trepashkin by the same Kremlin authorities who jailed him be useful, let alone reliable?
UPDATE…
Role playing the same game
Below is an interesting story by Will Englund in The Baltimore Sun back in 1998 mentioning the FSB, Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko and Trepashkin. It doesn’t seem much different from today, only the roles have changed.
KGB successor is accused of offering terror for hire; Bosses are crooks, say 5 Russian agents
By Will Englund
The Baltimore Sun
18 November 1998
Page 1AMOSCOW — The founder of the Soviet secret police was called “the man with the crystal soul,” because of his purity in the wielding of terror against the enemies of bolshevism.
Today, in post-Soviet Russia, the agency that grew out of Felix E. Dzerzhinsky’s leather-jacketed Cheka is less pure in its ideology but it hasn’t lost the terror part — except that now, according to a group of maverick officers, what’s being offered is terror for hire.
A trail of extortion, kidnappings and murder, all in the pursuit of criminal gain, leads directly to the inner offices of the Lubyanka, headquarters of Russia’s fearsome security police, said Lt. Col. Alexander Litvinenko and four of his associates at a news conference yesterday.
Disguised in sunglasses, and in one case, a black ski mask, the officers accused their bosses of using the Federal Security Service not so much to fight crime as to muscle in on the action.
Litvinenko said he had been ordered in December to kill Boris Berezovsky, the financial tycoon who controls the ORT television network and is close to President Boris N. Yeltsin. When the colonel refused, he was told he was foiling “patriots of the motherland from killing the Jew who has robbed half this country.”
Since then Litvinenko has been physically attacked on the street and has been accused of trying to extort $70,000 from a Russian businessman.
Maj. Andrei Ponkin, another of the maverick officers, said he had been ordered to kidnap the brother of Umar Dzhebrailov, a businessman who has close links to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Dzhebrailov is best known here for his lengthy struggle with an American, Paul Tatum, for control of the Radisson Hotel in Moscow, a struggle that was resolved in Dzhebrailov’s favor by Tatum’s murder in 1996.
Ponkin said he’d been told to kill Dzhebrailov’s brother if he offered any resistance, but the plot was later put on hold. Ponkin said he had asked for a written order, but his chief refused.
“We can’t understand why there’s any reason for someone wanting to get rid of us,” said a nervous Dzhebrailov, toying with a pencil and twirling a lock of hair during a television interview last night. He said he had provided every document about Tatum the police had demanded. “I cooperated completely.”
The maverick officers said in a statement that “certain officials” of the Federal Security Service have used the agency “to settle accounts with undesirable persons, to carry out private political and criminal orders for a fee and sometimes simply as an instrument to earn money.”
They said they hope the FSB, as it is known by its Russian initials, “will summon the courage to cleanse itself of those persons who, having attained the positions of generals and who embody state security, sabotage the gains of recent years and pervert the constitutional mission of the FSB — abusing their offices, issuing illegal orders to commit terrorist acts and assassinations, to seize hostages, to extort large sums of money from commercial structures and other illegal actions.”
The group of officers did not offer details of crimes, though Ponkin said he understood the agency was connected to the 1995 murder of Vladislav Listyev, a popular television personality who was combating corruption in advertising.
Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB agent, said he had been running an investigation in 1996 that had turned up evidence that high- ranking army officers were involved in illegal arms sales, extortion and murder.
“So I was removed from the case,” he said. “When I said I would challenge this order, they told me I would be fired.”
Three men came around to his house to beat him up. Litvinenko, now Trepashkin’s ally, revealed yesterday that he had been among the attackers.
Vladimir Putin, the recently installed director of the security service, said in a statement yesterday that allegations about a plot to kill Berezovsky and other crimes have been referred to the military prosecutor, and that no one will be protected by his rank.
At the same time, he said that Berezovsky, who first declared late last week that there was a plot on his life, was trying to bring “a certain pressure” on the investigation by going public.
The number of FSB agents is secret, but reportedly thousands have left the agency in recent years, many going into security work or crime, or both.
“Those who have left the FSB are closely connected to the criminal world,” said Vladimir Oivin, deputy director of the Glasnost Public Foundation, which has spent years examing the security service and its predecessor, the KGB. “But those still there may also be connected.”
Col. Alexander Zdanovich, an FSB spokesman, said last night that “all parties are trying to use the FSB for their own aims.”
“We’ve never been in anybody’s pocket and we never will be,” he said.
In a dogmatic assertion that harked back to the fervent era of Dzerzhinsky and the original secret police, the spokesman then flatly declared that an illegal FSB order was impossible and, if there were one, no one would obey it.
