Secret Police Officers Allege Former KGB Is A Den Of Crime

Secret Police Officers Allege Former KGB Is A Den Of Crime

MOSCOW (November 17, 1998 12:51 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - The body that succeeded the KGB, once the "sword and shield" of the Soviet state, is harboring networks of highly placed kidnappers, killers and thugs, a group of mid-ranking secret service officers charged on Tuesday.

At a bizarre news conference, agents of what is now called the Federal Security Service (FSB), wearing dark glasses and in one case a ski mask, said senior officers had ordered them to kill billionaire businessman Boris Berezovsky and threatened them with punishment if they told anyone.

Berezovsky himself, who also holds political office, had made the charge public in an open letter to FSB director Vladimir Putin published in a newspaper last Friday.

Putin released a statement on Tuesday saying the charge was under investigation.

"I am against public value judgments and generalizations being based solely on personal statements by some officials of the FSB, including former officials," Putin's statement said.

Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, who was assigned to Berezovsky's detail of FSB bodyguards and first informed the tycoon he had been ordered to kill him, told the news conference the plot was "not an exceptional event in the life of the FSB."

"In recent years the FSB organs have been used by certain officials not for constitutional purposes of state and personal security, but for their own private political and material purposes, to settle accounts with undesirable persons, to carry out private political and criminal orders for a fee and sometimes simply as an instrument to earn money," he said.

He accused senior FSB officials of "abusing their office, issuing illegal orders to commit terrorist acts, assassinations, to seize hostages, to extort large sums of money from commercial structures and other illegal actions."

"We hope that the FSB of Russia will summon the courage to cleanse itself of those persons."