Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2004. Page 1

For Trepashkin, Bomb Trail Leads to Jail

By Anatoly Medetsky
Staff Writer

Former intelligence officer Mikhail Trepashkin said he had evidence supporting a hair-raising theory that the Federal Security Service participated in the deadly 1999 apartment house bombings. He also suspected there was an FSB link in the Dubrovka theater siege.

Trepashkin, a practicing lawyer, planned to lay out some of the evidence in the Moscow City Court, which on Monday sentenced two men to life in prison on charges of helping carry out the bombings.

But on Oct. 22, a week before the trial started, he was stopped by police outside Moscow and arrested on changes of illegal arms possession. Police claimed to have found a gun in his car; Trepashkin says the gun was planted after he was stopped.

Three weeks later, on Dec. 15, he was transferred to the Matrosskaya Tishina prison and put on trial on charges of divulging state secrets and illegally possessing ammunition -- a separate case that prosecutors opened in 2002 but only recently finished investigating.

Trepashkin's wife, his lawyers and friends said in interviews that the two-pronged legal attack stems from Trepashkin's investigation into suspicions that could deal a stunning blow to the FSB.

If it hadn't been for the October arrest, "the court would have had to study the evidence," said Trepashkin's lawyer in the gun case, Yelena Liptser.

Trepashkin was to represent at the bombings trial the sisters Alyona and Tatyana Morozov, who lost their mother in the blast on Moscow's Ulitsa Guryanova. The replacement lawyer "was unprepared for the trial, and the court denied him time to study the case, so he didn't bring anything up," Liptser said.

Did Trepashkin have any damning evidence? "Apparently so, if he ended up behind bars," Liptser said.

But Nikolai Gorokhov, Trepashkin's assistant and a member of the defense team, said Trepashkin had just wanted to raise some troubling questions. "There was no direct evidence, but there definitely were some murky facts that had to be investigated," he said.

Trepashkin's findings suggest that a man named Vladimir Romanovich rented the basements in the Moscow apartment buildings that exploded, Trepashkin told the weekly Moskovskiye Novosti before his arrest. The explosives that destroyed the buildings were stored in the basements.

He said Romanovich was an intelligence officer whom he knew from his days in FSB service. Romanovich died after being hit by a car in Cyprus a few months after the bombings, he said.

The FSB, which denies having anything to do with the bombings, says another man, Achemez Gochiyayev, rented the basements and planted explosives there. Gochiyayev remains at large.

According to Trepashkin, Gochiyayev knew Romanovich as a business partner and was aware of the locations of the basements, but he didn't plant the explosives. Furthermore, it was Gochiyayev who alerted police about two other basements rented by Romanovich in Moscow, allowing them to safely defuse bombs that they subsequently found there, Trepashkin said.

Trepashkin unearthed his evidence after an independent State Duma commission asked him to investigate the bombings in the summer of 2002. The commission was formed by then-deputies Yuly Rybakov, Sergei Yushenkov, Sergei Kovalyov and Yury Shchekochikhin.

A decade-long career in the FSB meant Trepashkin knew the right avenues to get information, Gorokhov said. "He had many connections and friends. He knew where to go," he said in a telephone interview.

Trepashkin made no secret about his investigation and growing suspicions, giving interviews to newspapers and Ren-TV, a channel controlled by Unified Energy Systems.

"Troubles began as soon as he began cooperating with the commission and disseminating information," Gorokhov said.

He said authorities began receiving anonymous complaints about Trepashkin and the Military Prosecutor's Office called him in for questioning. The Military Prosecutor's Office opened its criminal investigation into Trepashkin at the end of 2002.

If convicted of the charges of divulging state secrets and illegally possessing ammunition, Trepashkin faces up to 10 years in prison, said his lawyer in that case, Valery Glushenkov.

The charges are based on a search of Trepashkin's apartment, in which investigators claimed to have found 30 classified copies of FSB documents that Trepashkin kept from his time at the agency and 22 cartridges, Glushenkov said.

Prosecutors say Trepashkin showed the documents to FSB officer Viktor Shebalin when asked for advice, thus revealing state secrets about the ways FSB operates, according to Glushenkov.

Trepashkin said he did show some of the documents to Shebalin, but they were not classified. The rest of the documents in question and the cartridges were planted, he said.

Misfortune has followed many members of the Duma commission looking into the bombings. Yushenkov was killed near the entrance to his apartment building in April, and Shchekochikhin died in a hospital later that year after apparently suffering food poisoning.

After Trepashkin's arrest, another member, Otto Latsis, editor of the liberal Russky Kuryer newspaper, was beaten unconsciousness. Kovalyov and Rybakov failed to win re-election to the Duma in last month's elections.

Several other people have suspected that there was a connection between the bombings and the FSB. One of them is former FSB Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, who fled to Britain and was granted asylum. Last year, a Moscow court convicted him in absentia on charges of abuse of office and stealing explosives and sentenced him to 3 1/2 years in prison.

Businessman Boris Berezovsky, whom Moscow has also tried to extradite and was granted British asylum last year, has bankrolled a film examining the FSB's possible role in the bombings.

Another documentary focusing on the FSB theory, titled "Disbelief" and directed by Andrei Nekrasov, is scheduled to debut Friday as the Russian entry at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

After Trepashkin took up the bombings investigation, Chechen rebels seized the Dubrovka theater in a hostage crisis that left scores of people dead. Trepashkin suspected that the FSB was involved there as well.

"This could not have happened without their knowledge," he told his wife, Tatyana. She recounted the conversation with her husband in an interview at a downtown cafe.

Trepashkin did not take many precautions as he pressed ahead with his investigation, his wife said. He shared his thoughts and findings with Litvinenko and other supporters, speaking on the telephone for hours despite being aware that it was probably tapped, she said.

"I want to live honestly and openly," Trepashkin wrote his wife from his prison cell in explaining why he had pursued the investigation.

But he is finding little support from a mother who is worried about raising their two daughters, 7 and 1, without a father. "I would like him to change his position," she said defiantly, her tired face framed by bleach-blond hair.

Clinching her fingers, she continued, "It's like he is bashing his head against a wall.

"He won't start a coup. The government will stay. They have surrounded themselves with a strong wall.

"In the best case scenario, they will jail him for a long time. In the worst case scenario, they won't be that ceremonious."

The word "ceremonious" can be a euphemism for being killed, and asked whether that was what she meant, she replied, "Yes."

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/01/14/001.html