Mikhail Ivanovich Trepashkin, (Russian:
Михаи́л Ива́нович Трепа́шкин)
(7 April 1957 – ) is a Moscow
attorney and former FSB colonel who was invited by MP Sergei Kovalev to
assist in an independent inquiry of the Russian apartment bombings
in September 1999 – the atrocities that followed Dagestan war and were one of the triggers
for the Second Chechen War.
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Mikhail Trepashkin started working in KGB in 1984 as an investigator of underground trade in stolen art. At the beginning of 1990s Trepashkin moved to Internal Affairs department of FSB where he worked for Nikolai Patrushev. He investigated connections of FSB officers with criminal groups. He won a medal for intercepting a plane-load of weapons sold by FSB officers to Chechen rebels.[1]
In 1995, Trepashkin got involved in the Bank Soldi affair. The situation is described by Scott Anderson in his 2009 GQ article. Trepashkin was working on an FSB sting operation against a bank extortion ring linked to Salman Raduyev, a Chechen rebel who was then fighting against Russia in the First Chechen War. The sting resulted in a raid on a Bank Soldi branch in Moscow in Dec 1995. Trepashkin claims that the raid uncovered bugging devices used by the extortionists, whose serial numbers linked their origin to the FSB or Ministry of Defense. Furthermore, a van outside the bank was monitoring the bugging devices, and in this van was an FSB agent, who Trepashkin claims was working for the criminals. His name was Vladimir Romanovich. However, most of those arrested in the sting were released. Nikolai Patrushev took Trepashkin off the case, and began an investigation of him instead. [2]
In 1997 Trepashkin wrote a letter to Yeltsin attempting to bring light to the case and corruption in the FSB. He resigned from the FSB, sued FSB leadership (he won), and got a job with the tax police. [3]
At a press conference on 17 November 1998 Alexander Litvinenko, Victor Shebalin and few other members of FSB claimed to have received an order to kill Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Trepashkin. The group members claimed that the order came from an FSB department called URPO, the Division of Operations against Criminal Organizations.[1][4]
Mikhail Trepashkin was invited by MP Sergei Kovalev to assist in an independent inquiry of the Russian apartment bombings. Two sisters whose mother was killed in one of the houses hired Trepashkin to represent them in the trial of two Russian Muslims accused of transporting explosives for the bombings.[5]
While preparing for the trial Trepashkin claims he uncovered a trail of a suspect whose description had disappeared from the files. He claimed that the man turned out to be an FSB member named Vladimir Romanovich, the same man he claimed had been working for criminals in the Moscow Bank Soldi raid of 1995[6]. Trepashkin said that a witness identified only the first of the 2 composite images distributed by the official investigation. This implied that the official investigation doctored the composite image to hide the perpetrators from the FSB.[7] But Trepashkin never managed to air his findings in court. On October 22, 2003, just a week before the hearings, Trepashkin was arrested for illegal arms possession. He was convicted by a closed military court to four years for illegal arms possession, for revealing state secrets and for abuse of the office.[8] An appeal court later overturned the arms possession charge, but the other sentence remained. In September 2005 after serving two years of his sentence, Trepashkin was released on parole, but two weeks later was re-arrested after the State appealed the parole decision [9].
Trepashkin investigated a letter attributed to Achemez Gochiyayev and found that the alleged Gochiyayev's assistant who arranged the delivery of sacks might have been vice-president of Kapstroi-2000 Kormishin, originally from Vyazma.[10]
Mikhail Trepashkin suffered from asthma with bronchial attacks on a daily basis, itching dermatosis and pain in the area of his heart, and he needed medical treatment. However, he was denied medical treatment, held in a freezing punishment cell, and transported with imprisoned tuberculosis patients who "were coughing right into your face because they were unable to either cover their mouths or turn away", according to Amnesty International [11]
In November 30, 2007 Mikhail Trepashkin was freed with the expiration of his four-year prison term. [12]
The case of Mikhail Trepashkin caught the attention of the Western press [13], caused an uproar among human rights campaigners [14][15][16][17][18], was put on record by Amnesty International, mentioned by the US State Department [19] and featured in an award-winning documentary Disbelief.[20]. The documentary was funded by anti-Kremlin oligarch Boris Berezovsky.[21]
American war correspondent Scott Anderson wrote a story about his interviews with Trepashkin for the September 2009 issue of the GQ magazine. However, according to NPR's David Folkenflik, Conde Nast management gave orders to limit circulation of the story. These included banning the story off of GQ's website, not showing the US issue to "Russian government officials, journalists or advertisers", not publishing the story in any overseas Conde Nast magazines, not publicizing the story, and asking Anderson to not syndicate it 'to any publications that appear in Russia'. [22][23]
In a letter from prison Trepashkin alleged, that an FSB team had organised in 2002 to kill Alexander Litvinenko. He also claimed that FSB had plans to kill relatives of Litvinenko in Moscow in 2002, although these have not been carried out [1].[24] [25] He was going to visit Litvinenko in London on a request from the FSB, but he was denied entrance visa by the UK.
Trepashkin claims that supervisors and people from the FSB promised not to send him to the prison if only he leaves the Sergei Kovalev commission and start working with the FSB "against Litvinenko" [26]
Trepashkin is married for the second time. He has two young children and a son from the first marriage.
   | call for action - Human Rights First | Human Rights Defender Cases |
| | Text of D.C. Bar International Law Section letter - The District of Columbia Bar |
| | Trepashkin statement - International Commission of Jurists |
| | Amnesty International appeal - Russian Federation: Health professional action, Mikhail Trepashkin |
| | "Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB." Free Press, New York, 2007. - Amazon.com: Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB: Alex Goldfarb, Marina Litvinenko: Books |
| | coverage - Former Russian officer accused of being MI5 spy | World news | The Guardian |
| | "Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB." Free Press, New York, 2007. - Amazon.com: Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB: Alex Goldfarb, Marina Litvinenko: Books |
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