The Moscow garrison military court on Friday sent five FSB officers into custody and two more under house arrest, Interfax reported. The court did not name their names and positions, but, according to the Rosbalt agency, two employees of the FSB Special Purpose Center were under house arrest, and two operatives from the “K” department (overseeing the banking sector) of the FSB Economic Security Service and three more were in custody. special forces soldier All of them are charged with robbery as part of an organized group on a large scale (Part 4 of Article 162 of the Criminal Code), they face up to 15 years in prison.

On July 2, the FSB reported that, together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, “military personnel of the FSB bodies involved in the theft of funds belonging to a private entrepreneur” were detained. The FSB did not respond to Vedomosti’s request.

As a law enforcement interlocutor told Vedomosti, the detainees are suspected of having taken 136 million rubles that belonged to a Moscow businessman during a staged search at the Metallurg Bank on June 10. According to another person in law enforcement, the intelligence officers received 6.5 million rubles each, and the rest went to their spotter from the bank, who, according to the Mash Telegram channel, was detained on Friday by FSB officers. The detainees believed that the money brought by the businessman was “dirty” and the bank intended to launder it, so the secret service officers would not receive anything for their seizure, explains Vedomosti’s interlocutor. But the money turned out to be legal, and its owner filed a police report. When criminal investigation officers identified the businessman’s offenders, the FSB’s Internal Security Department took over the case and carried out the arrest operation.

According to a source close to law enforcement agencies, the detainees were also involved in searches in a number of high-profile cases, during which part of the confiscated money disappeared, including from former Interior Ministry Colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko, FSB Colonel Kirill Cherkalin and those involved in the case of reconstruction of government residences . There are suspicions that they are also involved in this, but they have not yet been charged, the source says. There are also suspicions that the detained employees represented the informal security service of Oleg Kuzmin, the ex-chairman of the board of directors of the European Express bank, who was arrested at the end of June for illegally withdrawing funds abroad, adds another person close to law enforcement agencies.

The arrest of such a group, and even under such an article, is a shameful chapter for the special service, especially considering that four of them were fighters of the anti-terrorist departments “A” (known as “Alpha”) and “B” (Vympel). , says a person in the special services. But it is important that they were eventually detained, and did not begin to “sweep the garbage under the carpet,” he said.

This tendency is typical for all security officials: the higher their role in general, the greater the temptation to use their prerogatives for private interests, says political scientist Alexei Makarkin. The FSB is, of course, the main body in the modern system of law enforcement agencies, but even it cannot dominate others, the expert believes. This system of checks and balances came from Soviet times, where the NKVD quickly lost its role as the boss over all security forces, and still works well, Makarkin sums up.

FSB officers detained for robbery are being checked for involvement in other crimes