V. Gefter: we cannot assert that in 1999 apartment houses were blown up by FSB

Valentin Gefter, Director General of the Institute for Human Rights and a Board Member of the International Society "Memorial," has summed up intermediate outcomes of the work of the Public Commission for investigating the circumstances of explosions of apartment blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk and exercises in Ryazan in 1999:

"If to be quite diligent, the gathered information, to my mind, does not ensure any hundred-per-cent or any rather high probability and grounds to assert that certain particular employees of particular special agencies can be accused of involvement in the explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk; I do not speak about the incident in Ryazan. This does not mean at all a possibility of the opposite."

"The third episode dealt with by our Public Commission was the Ryazan one, in which, more or less, all the 'i's are dotted and the 'ears' of special agencies directly stick out," Mr. Gefter continued at his press conference on June 1 held in defence of condemned advocate Mikhail Trepashkin.

Lev Ponomaryov, leader of the Movement "For Human Rights," told about the trial of the defendants in the cases on terror acts in Moscow and Volgodonsk: "...the trial was held with violations of the remedial procedure, at accelerated rate, and it was obvious that elimination of Trepashkin from the trial was extremely necessary for the accusation.

The main episode to which Mikhail Trepashkin tried to draw attention - replacement, in the course of investigation, of the identikit of the person (identified by him as the FSB (Federal Security Bureau) secret agent Vladimir Romanovich) who had rented a cellar in the later blown up house in Moscow in the photo of Achemez Gochiyaev - was probably the key point in the whole trial. After advocate Trepashkin was withdrawn from the case, the above episode 'was forgotten'."