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Investigation of Murder of Russian Banking Official Classified
Prosecutors have opened a criminal case on charges of divulging state secrets in the investigation of the murder of Andrey Kozlov, first deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank. They say the methods that investigators used to find the criminals had been part of state secret until they were disclosed in papers. The Prosecutor General’s Office has thus made it clear for the press that any articles on ringing criminal cases may be now qualified as criminal deeds.
Salman Kovraev, head of the investigation team probing into the murder of Andrey Kazlov, has opened a criminal case on charges of divulging state secrets. A statement of the Prosecutor General’s Office says that journalists began divulging state secrets on October 10, one month after the killing of Kozlov. Prosecutors say that the source of the information is “related to investigation of the criminal case”. A large-scale overhaul in the agency has already begun.
Meanwhile, newspapers publish materials describing steps of investigators, which divulges a state secret, Kovraev insists. Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman is not worried about the leakage of reports that three suspects were arrested. However, he is convinced that public discussion of “means that investigators used in searching for the criminals and the way there were arrested” makes up a state secret.
Legal experts do not see any grounds for opening a criminal case on the divulging of information about investigation. “If a journalist writes, for example, ‘the criminals were traced by print-outs of their mobile calls’, it does not mean that the press has betrayed a secret,” Ruslan Koblev, a lawyer, says. “Everyone knows about this method. It has been mentioned thousand of times at trial. State prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin spoke about this method, too, during the Paul Khlebnikov case.”
Experts also note that a state secret can only be divulged by somebody who is aware of its classified nature. Journalists, however, had no idea that the information they got from their source was some kind of secret.
Sergey Mashkin
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 27, 2006
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