Monday, September 19, 2005. Issue 3255. Page 3. The Associated Press
For MT
Mikhail Trepashkin
Police on Sunday re-imprisoned Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB officer who was released last month after serving just under half of his four-year sentence on charges of revealing state secrets, his lawyer said.
Trepashkin, who had investigated the alleged role of the Federal Security Service in a series of apartment bombings in 1999, was detained at his home in Moscow, his lawyer Yelena Lipster said.
On Friday, a Sverdlovsk region court overturned a lower court decision to release him early for good behavior. Trepashkin arrived in Moscow on Aug. 31 after being freed from prison in Nizhny Tagil.
Trepashkin's wife, Tatyana, was quoted by RIA-Novosti as saying that police officers read the court ruling and said that they were taking him back to the prison in Nizhny Tagil.
"They were after him so much that now they will not let him go," she said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
Trepashkin, who had been in prison since his October 2003 arrest, has claimed that the FSB fabricated the charges in revenge for his investigation into the apartment bombings, which were part of the Kremlin's justification for sending troops back into Chechnya in 1999.
The FSB, where Trepashkin worked until 1997, claimed that the former officer was recruited by the British security service MI5 to collect compromising materials on the explosions with the aim of discrediting the FSB.
Trepashkin, now a lawyer, had been in Kiev with his wife Saturday and refused an offer from self-exiled businessman Boris Berezovsky to help him fly to a Western European country and apply for political asylum, an aide to Berezovsky said.
"He went back knowing fully that such a development was possible. This is a clear persecution of this man," Alex Goldfarb said by telephone. Berezovsky, a fierce Kremlin critic, has been granted political asylum in Britain.
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