Ex-agent's sentence decried as political
Had been probing Russian bombings
MOSCOW -- A former Russian intelligence agent who attempted to investigate possible government involvement in a series of deadly apartment bombings was sentenced yesterday to four years in prison on a charge of revealing state secrets.
A Moscow military court also found Mikhail Trepashkin, who was arrested a week before he was to have unveiled his findings on the bombings in a public courtroom, guilty on an unrelated weapons charge. Human rights groups said the case was an attempt to silence one of the most persistent voices of doubt in Russia's war on terrorism.
''The sentencing of Mikhail Trepashkin today proved that we have entered a period of political repressions in Russia once again. Trepashkin is a political prisoner, beyond any doubt," said Lev A. Ponomaryov, director of the All-Russian Movement for Human Rights.
Trepashkin, a former lieutenant colonel for the KGB and its successor agency, the FSB, was a private investigator for a parliament commission that two years ago set out to investigate a series of four bombings at apartment buildings across Russia in 1999. The attacks, which killed 243 people, were blamed on Chechen separatists and helped rally public support around Vladimir Putin's decision to launch a second war in the breakaway republic.
The commission looked into lingering suspicions that the FSB might have had a hand in the bombings. Those suspicions were triggered in part by reports that unknown persons had been seen unloading a white powdery substance and that barrels of the substance and a detonator were later found by local police in the basement of a fifth apartment building, in the western Russian city of Ryazan. FSB officials later said that their agents had placed the material there but said the substance was sugar and insisted it was only a drill.
One of Trepashkin's lawyers, Nikolai Gorokhov, said in an interview that the investigator -- who had been forced out of his FSB job in 1997 in a dispute over another investigation -- recognized a composite drawing of a man who rented the basement space used in one of the explosions. He believed the drawing depicted former FSB agent Vladimir Romanovich; two other witnesses, including a Moscow organized crime officer, supported the contention.
Shortly after Trepashkin made public his assertions about the drawing, it disappeared and a new composite sketch was distributed, Gorokhov said.
Romanovich was killed in a car accident in Cyprus a few months after the apartment bombings. Two of the four parliament deputies who launched the apartment bombing investigation also are dead -- one shot to death outside his home last spring, one the victim of a sudden and unidentified food allergy in July 2003.
Two Chechen men were convicted of involvement in the bombings in January and sentenced to life imprisonment. The men admitted some role in transporting the explosives, and one of them, Adam Dekkushev, said he was a member of the rebel group prosecutors linked to the bombings but insisted he had been a victim of ''religious propaganda."
The FSB has repeatedly denied any role in the bombings, and Putin has denounced any attempts to lay blame on the government.
''There is nobody in the Russian special services capable of committing such a crime against our own people," Putin, a former FSB director, told the Kommersant newspaper. ''It is immoral even to consider such a possibility."
Standing in a cage in the courtroom yesterday, Trepashkin, 47, said he is convinced his work on the apartment bombing case motivated the criminal charges.
''This case is utterly political," he said.
The state secrets charge, he said, involved reports and personnel lists from his own files from nearly a decade ago. ''They have got nothing to do with Russia's state secrets . . . it's a terrible joke," he said.
''By having Trepashkin sentenced today, the FSB is sending out a clear-cut and unambiguous message to all its officers who still may believe it is possible to fight the system through the courts," said his lead attorney, Valery G. Glushenkov. ''Look what is going to happen to you, should you decide to rebel and confront the system." 