Criminal case documents link data used in Navalny poisoning investigation to FSB agents

The Russian investigative outlet The Insider and its partner Bellingcat have published extracts from a criminal case that appear to corroborate that the data used in their joint investigation into the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny is the legitimate data of FSB agents.

The documents in question relate to a criminal case opened over the illegal acquisition of data from Russian mobile phone operators — specifically, the phone records of Navalny’s alleged poisoners.

The extracts include the names of the FSB agents who had their data accessed. One excerpt quoted by The Insider even appears to refer to the journalists’ investigative report directly, by mentioning its publication date. “On December 14, 2020, mass media published the photographs and data of officers of the FSB of Russia, allegedly involved in the so-called ‘poisoning’ of Russian public and political figure A.A. Navalny,” it reads.

The excerpt goes on to say that “it was possible to establish the identity of the officers, the details of their connections, the subscriber numbers they used, and the location of base stations by means of illegally obtaining information from the telecommunications companies PJSC ‘MTS’ and PJSC ‘MegaFon’.”

“Thus, having initiated a criminal case, the FSB and Investigative Committee confirmed that the details of the FSB officers published by The Insider and Bellingcat, which became one of the most important pieces of evidence of their involvement in the poisoning, are authentic, and that they were obtained not from ‘American special services,’ as Putin said in a press conference in December, but from Russian [cellular] operators.”

The Insider

• On November 1, reports emerged that Moscow law enforcement had arrested three people on suspicion of illegally obtaining phone records that were allegedly used in the journalistic investigation into Navlany’s poisoning. According to a TASS source, the three suspects have pleaded guilty.
• The joint investigation into Navalny’s poisoning was published in December 2020. It implicated a group of FSB operatives in the attempt on the opposition politician’s life, based on their cell phone metadata, which appeared to show that these agents had been tailing Navalny across Russia for years.