Translated material
“Fontanka”: in St. Petersburg, the head of the department of Center “E” was detained for a bribe of a million rubles
In St. Petersburg, FSB officers detained police lieutenant colonel Eduard Tugushev, head of the department for the implementation of the regional center for countering extremism of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Center E), while transferring a bribe. This was reported by the St. Petersburg edition of Fontanka, citing a source.
Tugushev was detained on the evening of January 16 at the exit of a cafe in the Primorsky district of the city. There, he and an unnamed major of the criminal investigation department were supposed to receive a million rubles from a resident of St. Petersburg, who was threatened with criminal prosecution. The transfer of the bribe took place under the control of the department "M" of the FSB, which "supervises the power unit," the newspaper writes.
Tugushev's accomplice managed to escape.
The publication also reports that shortly before the arrest, both police officers received another one million rubles - also under the control of the FSB.
As for Lieutenant Colonel Tugushev, according to our acquaintances in the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, “he is one of the most effective leaders of the E Center. Moreover, due to the specifics of his service, he maintains practically friendly relations with the operational staff of the Anti-Terrorism Service of the regional FSB. So, for example, they work together through the Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami organization banned in Russia. “He gave stable disclosures,” we were told.
- The Directorate for Combating Extremism of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia (Center "E") was created to combat both extremist and terrorist activities. Employees of the E Center are involved in cases under “extremist” articles of the criminal code, including 280 and 282. Often such cases are initiated for posts on social networks . In November 2017, Russian human rights activists called for the liquidation of Center E: in their opinion, now the department “to a large extent <...> persecutes the ideological opponents of the authorities.”