The Department of the Investigative Committee for St. Petersburg opened a criminal case on abuse of power against a major of the local police, found out Kommersant . He is suspected of selling the data of air passengers on the flight on which oppositionist Alexei Navalny fell ill on August 20. He later blamed the FSB for his poisoning.
According to the newspaper, the investigation believes that on September 8 and 9, 2020, the suspected police officer searched the Rozysk-Magistral service base for information about flights from Tomsk to Moscow on August 20 and 21 and, having received personal data about the passengers of S7 flight 2614, who Navalny flew, "handed them over to a certain person."
The case of the St. Petersburg major could have led to the detention and many hours of interrogation without a lawyer of Baza journalist Myaila Maciulite on February 27, Kommersant writes. The Fontanka journalist reports that she agreed with the version of the operatives that she asked her friend Golubev to punch in the corresponding names in the Magistral. To the question of who asked her about this, Maciulita's answer is unknown, but, according to the publication, it was not Navalny.
Fontanka notes that the rumors about the initiation of a criminal case on abuse of power against the police major are somewhat exaggerated. Firstly, given the data contained in the Magistral departmental database, namely the full name or surname with initials, it is difficult to call their transfer a disclosure of personal data. In addition, there is no information in the materials of the investigation that Gladyshev and Golubev received any remuneration, and this is denied by the Baza journalist.
This is not the first case related to the “breakthrough” of personal data used in the investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider and FBK with the participation of CNN and Spiegel. On January 19, 2021, it became known about the initiation of an abuse of power case against a Samara police officer. As RBC wrote , senior lieutenant Kirill Chuprov was checked for involvement in the leak of data from the Rozysk-Magistral database, which later appeared in the investigation into the poisoning of Navalny.
On December 14, 2020, Bellingcat and The Insider, with the participation of CNN and Spiegel, published an investigation showing that the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been in preparation for several years and could not have been carried out without the knowledge of the FSB leadership. The investigation was based on an analysis of the billing of "hundreds of thousands" of calls and air travel data from the leaked bases, which provided a nearly complete picture of the suspected poisoners' connections and confirmed their links to the FSB. The main thing from this investigation we told here.