Former Russian officer accused of being MI5 spy
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Friday January 16, 2004
The Guardian
A former officer in the Russian security services, the FSB, who recently
investigated the bombing of several apartment buildings across Russia in 1999
for an independent commission of MPs, has been accused of being recruited to
spy for the British security service, MI5.
Mikhail Trepashkin
was arrested in October and began
trial last month in a sealed courtroom for disclosing
state secrets and possession of an illegal handgun and ammunition.
His indictment has not been
made public because of the strict secrecy in which Russia holds
espionage trials.
Yet according
to detailed notes taken by
Mr Trepashkin of his indictment, seen by the Guardian,
he is accused by the FSB of planning
to use his privileged access to its archives
as a former officer to gather compromising
material about the apartment bombings.
He denies the accusation.
His wife
and friends say he is being prosecuted
for exposing evidence of the FSB's involvement in the blasts, which
killed 246 and were blamed on Chechen rebels, sparking the second
war in the strife-torn republic.
A Moscow
court on Monday jailed two men for life for the
blasts, in what many saw as an attempt to close
the lid on one of the more
perplexing and dark episodes of Russia's recent history. Vladimir Putin's tough response
to this domestic
"terrorism" won him his first mandate
in the presidential election of 2000.
Mr Putin's opponents claim that the FSB planned
the apartment blasts to get
"their man" into power, a theory
the Kremlin vigorously denies. Relatives of the blast victims
have written an open letter saying
that there remain many unanswered
questions about the bombings, and
demanding to know why Mr
Trepashkin was arrested. Mr Trepashkin,
who was sacked
from the FSB more than six
years ago, had claimed to have
fresh evidence about the security
service's involvement in the blasts.
According to his notes of his indictment, the FSB allege he would then
pass this information to another former FSB officer, Alexander Litvinenko, and the Russian tycoon
and former Kremlin kingmaker Boris Berezovsky. Both men have political asylum in London and would then
pass the information to MI5, the notes say. The FSB conclude that the plan was
for a "project of misinformation" implicating
it in the blast.
Mr Trepashkin
was arrested three months after
being summoned by military prosecutors
for questioning about his links with Mr Litvinenko,
an ally of Mr Berezovsky who has testified of his personal knowledge about the FSB's alleged
involvement in the explosions.
Mr Trepashkin's
home was searched last January
by FSB officers. They claimed to
have found numerous confidential papers, up to
15 years old, that he had stored
during his time working at the FSB. He was
later arrested for illegal possession of a firearm.
His wife,
Tatyana, said at the time that the
gun had been planted. She said
yesterday: "My husband had a mania to keep all his documents
from the time he worked at the
FSB at home. I thought they were garbage,
but [the FSB] found them, and latched
on to them."
Mr Litvinenko
has previously denied any wrongdoing. Mr Berezovsky was
granted asylum in Britain after Scotland
Yard was alerted to a possible
attempt to assassinate him in the court that
was hearing a warrant from Russia
to extradite him.
Andrew Stephenson,
a solicitor for Mr Berezovsky, said: "If the Russians thought
they had evidence of secret confidential information being supplied to Mr
Berezovsky, I would have expected that
to have been
raised during the extradition hearing. It was
not."
The details
of the 1999 apartment bombings have become
part of an ongoing feud between Mr
Putin and Mr Berezovsky, who has relentlessly publicised accusations of FSB involvement.