Posted on 07/01/2003 5:23:22 PM PDT by Brian_Baldwin
Wednesday, Jul. 2, 2003. Page 1
The Moscow Times
Police announced Tuesday that they have busted up a ring of active and former Federal Border Service officials who forged Russian foreign travel passports and arranged for wanted criminals to sneak out of the country through Sheremetyevo Airport.
City police detectives working with Federal Security Service agents arrested six suspected members of the gang and found 40 forged passports in one of the suspects' apartments, a police spokeswoman said. Some of the passports were stamped with fake U.S. visas, apparently to make them appear more legitimate, she said.
The ring operated by entering the forged passports into the Federal Border Service's electronic data base and then arranging for the holders to pass through the airport checkpoint, the spokeswoman said, speaking on condition she not be identified. The fee varied from $3,500 to $10,000, she said.
"The largest channel for smuggling people who are on the wanted list has been shut down," Fillip Zolotnitsky, spokesman for the economic crime directorate, told Interfax on Monday. Calls to Zolotnitsky went unanswered. The group was headed by a former border guard officer who ran a private security company after retiring, the police spokeswoman said. He and two accomplices worked hand in hand with three border guards at Sheremetyevo-2.
Neither she nor a Federal Border Service officer, reached by telephone at the service's headquarters, would say when the arrests took place or identify the suspects. The border guard officer said only that two of the Sheremetyevo guards are men, one is a woman, and one of the three is an officer.
All have been charged with abuse of power and bribery, and could spend up to 10 years in prison if tried and convicted, the police spokeswoman said.
Police are busy trying to identify the people whose photos are in the seized passports and to determine how many people may already have slipped away from Russia with the help of this ring, she said. Police suspect that some contract killers could have used the forged passports to flee Russia, Channel One television reported.
The police spokeswoman said the ring was busted in a sting operation run by the city police force's economic crime department. She said it worked like this: A detective, posing as a potential client, got in touch with the suspects. They forged a passport for him, and included four fake U.S. visas as well as several exit and entry stamps. The detective then used the passport to go through border control at Sheremetyevo-2 with the help of one of the three border guards.
The Federal Border Service official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his service is conducting an internal investigation of what he described as "an unprecedented incident."
The official disputed the police version of events, saying that even if the three border guards committed crimes, they were not to his knowledge members of any organized group. "They constitute no gang," he said. In Russian news reports, the suspects were immediately branded a "gang of border guards." Rossia television called them "werewolves," the same word Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov used to describe a group of officers from the Moscow police force's criminal investigation directorate, or MUR, who were arrested last week. In Russian, the word oboroten, or werewolf, is commonly used for officers who have turned bad.
The MUR officers are suspected of conspiring to extort protection fees from Moscow businesses and planting drugs and pistols on those who refused to pay. Following their arrests, the Interior Ministry vowed to crack down on crooked cops and promised more arrests.
A spokeswoman for the Federal Security Service, which assumed command of the Federal Border Service this week, confirmed that FSB agents participated in the raid but would not elaborate.
Calls to the press service of the Moscow city prosecutor's office, which presented the charges against the six suspects and is now leading the investigation, went unanswered.
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