Soon after the unsuccessful attempt on Los s life, operational officers detained Borisov with his closest lieutenant Sergei Kustov (an oriental martial arts trainer) and several rank and file warriors, who were registered as managers with the limited company Petrovsky Autocenter. Biriuchenko and the members of his team were hunted right across Russia, in Pskov, Vologda and Rostov, and in the villages of the Novgorod Region. Biriuchenko himself hid for a long time in Prague, where he was finally arrested with assistance from Interpol and transported to St. Petersburg under armed guard.
In most of the proven cases, the murders were committed in the hallways of buildings, and the contract killers used a wide range of weapons, from TT pistols and SVD sniper s rifles to homemade explosive devices based on plastic explosives. In normal times, a hired killer s wages were between 200 and 500 dollars, and for each task completed a bonus of 2,000 dollars was paid.
The investigators accused Borisov, Biriuchenko, and Kustov of four contract murders, banditry, extortion, and other serious crimes. The members of the group were suspected of virtually all the spectacular murders committed in St. Petersburg and the north-west of Russia, beginning from the fall of 1997. In particular, checks were made on their possible involvement in the death of Manevich and the attempt on the life of Nikolai Aulov, the deputy head of RUBOP. Several of the operatives who worked on this case are still convinced that they only exposed the tip of the iceberg. According to Vadim Pozdnyak, leader of the operational investigations group, if we had been released from other current business, we would certainly have uncovered at least another ten crimes committed by this band.
In 1995, Lazovsky set up a group similar to the Uzbek Quartet consisting of veterans from the Vitiaz and Vympel special units: Kirill Borisov, Alexei Sukach (who was
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awarded a medal For Bravery for action in Chechnya and several MVD interior forces decorations), Armen Shekhoyan, and Pavel Smirnov. Subsequently, the only charge on which they were tried was involvement in contract killings. The group operated for four years, and its contractor would appear to have been Marat Vasiliev.
In 1999, Vasiliev was arrested and sentenced to thirteen years of hard labor in a penal colony for the killing in 1993 of a certain Aliev, the owner of a row of stalls at the Liublino market (this was the only crime for which Vasiliev was convicted). In the fall of 2000, Borisov was detained, and after him so were the other special operations men, Shekhoyan, Smirnov, and Sukach. The group s arsenal was discovered in Sukach s apartment: seven submachine guns, ten Makarov pistols, two CZ MOD-83 pistols made in the Czech republic, and a Rohm German revolver. When the trial began in Moscow in April 2001, the accused denied absolutely all of the charges which were brought against them. The question of their possible involvement, or Lazovsky s involvement, in terrorist attacks in Moscow in September 1999 was not even raised by the investigators or the public prosecutor s office. Suprunenko kept in mind the sad fate of his predecessor, Vladimir Tskhai, and decided not to give the FSB any reason for getting rid of him.
The Vympel operatives were accused of purely criminal offenses. For instance, the public prosecutor s office alleged that on May 21, 1996, Marat Vasiliev suggested that Borisov and Sukach should sort things out with the owners of the Usadba cafe and kebab-house located thirty-six kilometers along the Moscow ring road. At three o clock in the morning, the warriors arrived at the kebab-house, doused it with petrol, and set it on fire.
When the owners of the cafe, Gazaryan and Dulian, came running out of the burning building, pistol shots were fired at them (but only over their heads, to give them a fright).
On September 23, Dmitry Naumov, the head of the Italian firm Dimex was murdered. He sold oil products from Chechnya abroad and had pocketed a large part of the revenue.
Naumov, who was known under the nickname Bender, only rarely made an appearance in Russia. He had dual citizenship and spent most of his time in Italy. In May 1996, however, he came to Moscow on business and stayed at the Balchug-Kempinski Hotel, where Borisov and Sukach saw him for the first time.
On September 23, Naumov turned up in Moscow again and took a room at the Tverskaya Hotel. At about six o clock in the evening, Sukach, who was on Triumfalnaya Square in front of the Maiakovskaya subway station, received two TT pistols with silencers from a go-between and then handed them on to Borisov. The killer was then taken to the hotel in a Zhiguli automobile driven by Pavel Smirnov. Borisov went up to the fourth floor, where he bumped into Naumov in the hall and opened fire from both rods at once. All five of the bullets he fired struck his victim in the head. On his way out of the hotel, Borisov told the security guard: They re shooting people in your hotel and you re asleep. The guard went dashing upstairs and Borisov got into the Zhiguli and drove away. A couple of days later, everyone involved in the murder was in Chechnya.
Lazovsky was arrested but did not give the Vympel officers away. The group soon returned to Moscow, and on July 11, 1997, on Marat Vasiliev s orders, they killed the
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general director of the Harley Enterprises firm, Alexander Bairamov, who imported cigarettes into Russia on privileged terms. The businessman did not want to share the profits from his latest deal, which had earned him eight million dollars. On First Krasnogvardeisky Passage, one of the Vympel officers cars cut in front of Bairamov s Mercedes, forcing it to crash into another automobile (with the killers in it). When the drivers involved in the accident got out of their cars, Borisov and Shekhoyan literally shot Bairamov full of holes (Sukach s pistol jammed).
Once again, the group went away to Chechnya for a while, but by May 1998, they were back in Moscow to carry out another contract, for the murder of the general director of the Wind of the Century Company, Alexander Redko, who was an assistant to the Liberal Democrat Party State Duma deputy, Alexei Zuev. On June 18, the killers arrived at the garages on Kravchenko Street and began waiting for their victim. When the businessman took out his car and went to close the garage, Borisov and Sukach opened fire. Redko s guards gave chase, but they couldn t catch the former special operations officers. Redko was seriously wounded, but he survived.
On June 25, 1998, the chairman of the town council of Neftiugansk, Petukhov, was killed. Information gathered in the course of an operation with the highly significant title of Predators, led the investigators to conclude that the contract for the murder had been issued by Suslov and carried out by Lazovsky.
On August 23, 1998, Borisov and Sukach killed Dmitry Zaikin, a member of Lazovsky s group, for stealing a large delivery of drugs from Sukach. At one o clock in the morning, Sukach drove Zaikin to Marino in a Volga automobile and shot him right there in the car.
Then Sukach and Borisov drove the body to the wasteland at Verkhnie polia, dismembered it with a spade, and buried it, throwing the head into the Moscow River.
In 1998, Morev s special group began operations. The way in which it was set up is quite commonplace. Morev served in the armed forces in Chechnya in a separate surveillance battalion of the Eighth Regiment of the special operations forces of the VDV (military unit 3866). Near Argun the unit ran into an ambush, and only three of them were left alive. They were rescued by helicopter. A few days later, the three of them set out for the small village of Svobodny which lay close by. The surveillance officers opened the doors of the houses and tossed grenades inside. The five houses in the village were totally destroyed, and the women, children, and old men inside were killed. Later there was an investigation and the military prosecutor initiated a criminal case. The three soldiers were threatened with a court-martial. At that time, in April 1996, Andrei Morev was recruited by an FSB colonel in the special section to which he had been taken. The colonel offered Morev a simple choice: go to jail or work with us. Morev chose the second option and was given the code name Yaroslav. He was then transferred to the reserve and set off home to the town of Yaroslavl. For two years, he was forgotten, then in 1998, they remembered about him,
and he was summoned to Moscow.
The special group contained twelve men, all of whom had served in Chechnya and been forgiven certain transgressions in exchange for their collaboration. The group was
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informed that its main task was to liquidate particularly dangerous criminals and underworld bosses. The team operated inside and outside Russia. It made working trips to Iraq, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Moldavia. Groups of two or three men were always sent on special missions. In Iraq, they liquidated a former intelligence agent from either the SVR or the GRU.
In Ukraine, they liquidated a local businessman by the name of Tishchenko. The group flew into Kiev, having been given Tishchenko s photograph in Moscow, as well as the address of a secret apartment on Kiev s main street, and the make and number of their victim s car. They obtained a bag containing their weapon from a pigeon-hole at the left luggage office of the railroad station, using a number and code also provided in Moscow.
The gun was a dismantled SVD sniper s rifle. The apartment in Kiev was empty, and its windows overlooked a road junction with traffic lights. Tishchenko always followed exactly the same route, and his car often stopped at this junction, and that was where they shot him, from the window of the apartment. The operation took just one day.
Usually, no more than two days were allowed for a liquidation, although the planning and preparation might last as long as a year: the routes followed by the target were checked, and so were his acquaintances, habits and work schedule. Two days before the deadline, the hired killer was provided with information about his victim, and he arrived at the scene to find everything in place for him to complete the job. For instance, the Yaroslavl underworld boss, who went by the name of Perelom ( Break or Fracture, as in a broken arm), was shot down with automatic weapons in the very center of town, as he was driving up to his house. The group worked with gunsights, so that the bandits girlfriends who were in the car would not be hurt. The automatics were abandoned at the scene, together with the ID of some Chechen (the operation s Moscow controllers thought it would be a good idea to send the investigation off along the Chechen trail ).
The group s final operation to eliminate a target took place on June 2, when they killed a local policeman in Voronezh. They sabotaged the brakes in his car so that the policeman crashed into a specially positioned truck at high speed.
The group gathered for briefings once a week in an apartment in Building 1 of house 5 on Vagonoremontnaya Street (a woman and her child lived in the apartment). The group met their controller here, an FSB officer by the name of Vyacheslav (he never mentioned his surname even once), and he gave the group their missions. All of the special group s members had cover documents with false names. Morev, for instance, had three passports (as Andrei Alexeievich Rastorguev, Mikhail Vasilievich Kozlov and Alexander Sergeievich Zimin). He also had an external passport in the last name.
The special group was not registered among the staff of any of the departments of law enforcement or the special forces. In other words, it never officially existed. This freelance special team worked to a high professional level. In two years of operations, they had only one failure, due to the fact that the target (one of Gennady Zyuganov s assistants) failed to show up at the scene in Moscow. One operation was also called off in Kishinev, when some people in FAPSI had ordered the elimination of the director of a local wine factory, but then canceled the operation at the last moment (by an odd
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coincidence, warrant officers from FAPSI in Moscow earned some money on the side in their free time as security men in one of the firms shipping wine from Moldavia, and the head of security at FAPSI was informed about this).
On several occasions, the special group brought weapons out of Chechnya. The briefings before these trips did not take place on Vagonoremontnaya Street, but at 38 Petrovka Street, in the premises of the MUR. Before they set out, the members of the group were given police uniforms and appropriate identity cards. One of these trips was typical. They made their way via Volgograd to Mozdok in Gazelle goods vans; on the approaches to Mozdok the column was met by a KamAZ army truck carrying the weapons (submachine guns, SVD sniper s rifles, and TNT). They unpacked it all from the green army crates and soldered it into zinc coffins, as though they were transporting dead bodies. Then the column of Gazelles with load 200 set off back to Moscow. Since it was escorted by FSB employees, there were no surprises along the way. The cargo was unloaded in housing estate number 9 in Solntsevo, where the special group also gave back their police uniforms and passes and collected their bonuses. The whole excursion lasted two weeks.
Depending on the amount of weapons they brought back, each of the participants on such a trip would earn from 700 to 2,000 dollars.
The group s final weapon-smuggling operation took place during the first half of August 2000. At that time, the special team was already having problems. First, several of its members disappeared, then another one drowned in the Volga River. In June, Gennady Chugunov, Mikhail Vasiliev and Sergei Tarasiev (their real names) were burnt to death in their car. Morev had been traveling with them in the Zhiguli, but he got out earlier since he had a meeting arranged with his cousin. Before the trip, the Zhiguli had stood for a while at number 38 Petrovka Street.
When he heard about his friends death, Morev first videotaped his testimony as insurance, then left copies of the tape at several different addresses, and got out of Moscow. He was then put on the federal wanted list for ferrying weapons out of Chechnya and attempted murder. Now, Morev wanders around Russia, taking care not to sleep anywhere for more than two nights in a row. But unlike his comrades, he is still alive.
The secret services were also involved in the murder in St. Petersburg on November 20, 1998, of Galina Starovoitova, State Duma deputy and leader of the Russia s Democratic Choice movement, and the wounding of her assistant Ruslan Linkov. While the criminals abandoned the Agran-2000 automatic pistol and the Beretta they used to murder Starovoitova, for some reason, they took the USP pistol, used to wound Linkov in the head, away with them. In November 1999, Konstanin Nikulin, a former soldier of the Riga OMON, was arrested in Latvia. When searched he was found to be carrying a ninemillimeter pistol which forensic examination demonstrated was the one with which Linkov had been wounded.
However, the St. Petersburg UFSB refused to accept this. UFSB press secretary A.
Vostretsov stated that there is at present no information indicating Nikulin s
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involvement with this case. The investigative agencies instead, put forward a financial explanation for Starovoitova s murder, which essentially claimed that several days before the killing took place, a meeting of sponsors of Russia s Democratic Choice had been held in the organization s Moscow office, and they had allocated 890,000 dollars for elections to the legislative assembly in St. Petersburg. The FSB claimed that the money had been handed over to Starovoitova, and she had written out a receipt which was put in the safe at the movement s headquarters. Unfortunately, no one had seen this receipt, since a week after the murder, the Russia s Democratic Choice office was burgled, and Starovoitova s receipt disappeared. Russia s Democratic Choice has always rejected the account of the murder as being motivated by theft.
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Chapter 10
The secret services and abductions Every time we hear about beheadings, we are reminded of the abduction and brutal execution of hostages in Chechnya. Everybody knows that most of the abductions are carried out by Chechen bandits in the hope of extorting ransom. Just how difficult a job it is to get hostages freed can be seen from the well-known case of the abduction of Magomet Keligov. On September 15, 1998, Keligov, who was born in 1955, was kidnapped in the town of Malgobek by a Chechen organized criminal group from UrusMartan, headed by Rizvan Varaev. The group s scout in this case and organizer of the crime was Keligov s neighbor, one of the inhabitants of the town of Malg
obek. The kidnappers believed that they would not be identified, and they began sending intermediaries to the Keligov family to convey their demands for a ransom of five million dollars. The Keligovs, however, refused to pay up. The scout was rapidly identified and placed under arrest, and all the members of Varaev s group were identified. Varaev then openly admitted that he was holding Magomet Keligov hostage and demanded the ransom.
The victim s family had resolved not to pay the ransom (they probably didn t have that kind of money anyway). In fact the Keligov family paid for a special state anti-terrorism unit to prepare an operation to capture and eliminate Varaev s band. At 14.00 hours on July 22, 1999, the Keligovs and members of the special unit ambushed members of the gang, who were returning to Urus-Martan from the village of Goiskoe in three automobiles. The column was raked with automatic weapons fire and shelled from grenade-throwers for twenty minutes. Seven members of the gang were killed, and five were wounded. The Keligovs and the members of the special unit then went to Ingushetia, taking with them Aslan Varaev s body and the badly wounded Rizvan Varaev. Rizvan died shortly afterwards, but the Keligovs, nonetheless, announced that the Varaev brothers had only been wounded, and they were willing to exchange them for Magomet Keligov. In the course of subsequent negotiations with spokesmen for Varaev s gang, the Keligovs were forced to admit that Aslan and Rizvan had been killed, but even so, the bandits agreed to exchange Magomet Keligov for the bodies of the two brothers.
Alexander Litvinenko Page 25