Jan 15, 2003 Posted: 14:21 Moscow time (10:21 GMT)
MOSCOW - A leading human rights activist went to court Tuesday to demand
Russia's chief prosecutor let him see documents relating to a 1999 bomb
scare that led to suspicions of government involvement in apartment-building
bombings that killed more than 300 people the same year.
Moscow's Tverskoi district court postponed a hearing into the complaint filed
by Sergei Kovalyov, a lawmaker and member of a nongovernment commission
looking into allegations that security personnel were involved in the bombings,
which Russian officials blamed on Chechen rebels, TVS television reported.
Kovalyov wants the court to force the Prosecutor General's Office to give him
access to documents relating to on its decision not to open a criminal probe into
the actions of security agents involved in the bomb scare, which the Federal Security
Service, or FSB, says resulted from an anti-terrorism training exercise.
Accusations from some Russian media and a former FSB officer that the FSB was
behind three deadly bombings - two in Moscow and one in the southern city of Volgodonsk
- have focused on the bomb scare in the city of Ryazan, where police evacuated
residents of an apartment building after finding what seemed to be explosives.
FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev later announced it had been a training drill and that
the powder found in the building was sugar, but some observers argued that the
substance was in fact explosives and had been planted by the FSB. The agency,
the chief successor of the Soviet KBG, has repeatedly dismissed the claims.
The prosecutor's office carried out its own examination of the Ryazan incident
and decided not to launch a criminal investigation into the security officials
involved. Kovalyov asked the office for access to documents backing up that decision
but was denied, TVS reported.
"It is suspected ... either that the exercise was conducted outrageously wrongly
or that it was not an exercise at all - those are the suspicions raised in the
press," Kovalyov said on TVS. "How should the authorities refute these suspicions?
They should refute them with complete openness."
The court postponed a hearing on the matter until Feb. 4, citing a technical problem
with documents presented by the prosecutor's office, TVS reported.
A representative of the prosecutor's office, Vladimir Vodolazkin, told TVS that
all the documents lawmakers had requested concerning the Ryazan incident had already
presented to them. "We do not agree with his arguments and in our opinion they
are not based on law," Vodolazkin said of Kovalyov.