People who swiftly collected 5,000 ruble bank notes scattered on a Moscow street after a government official threw a bribe of 10 million rubles ($320,000) out his car window have turned some of them over to the Federal Security Service — possibly because they were marked by the FSB.
"Teachers, taxi drivers and other passers-by have brought a total of 25,000 rubles to Lubyanka," an unidentified law enforcement source told Lifenews.ru.
Lubyanka is the FSB headquarters, named after the central Moscow square where it is located.
The returned money, worth a little less than $1,000, could be a fraction of the missing amount, which news reports have put at between 55,000 rubles ($1,770) and 1 million rubles ($32,200).
Federal Fisheries Agency official Boris Simonov tossed the cash out his car window on the busy Varshavskoye Shosse on Thursday as he fled police, who accuse him of accepting the money as a bribe. He is now bring held on bribery charges together with his boss, Roman Postnikov.
Most of the 5,000 ruble bank notes were collected by police officers, who blocked the road after a short moment of shock at seeing the cash scattered across the asphalt. But some of the money disappeared.
Investigators marked all the bank notes before the handover, most likely with a special powder that can be detected by anti-counterfeiting machines used in many stores, making it nearly impossible to spend the money, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, citing the police.