Dmitry Yakubovsky, a lawyer appointed last year by President Boris Yeltsin to investigate possible corruption among some of his most powerful political rivals, has been mysteriously detained in Moscow, a spokesman for the lawyer said Wednesday.


Nikolai Gulbinsky said in a telephone interview with The Moscow Times that his boss had been detained Tuesday at midday in Moscow by "a state law-and-order organization."


"Although these people showed Yakubovsky's guards state identification cards, we do not know what kind of a secret service they represent. But we do know for certain that it is not a crime group and it was not a kidnapping," Gulbinsky said.


He said it had also been established that Yakubovsky, 31, had been transported from Moscow to some other location that his staff was trying to identify.


Spokesmen at the Counterintelligence Service, the Interior Ministry, the Main Guard Department and the President's Security Service all said they had no knowledge of the detention.


But a spokesman for the Moscow police, Vladimir Vershkov, said Yakubovsky had been detained by St. Petersburg "law-and-order organs."


"I do not know the reasons of it and what kind of a St. Petersburg security organ detained him," Vershkov said. "But at present Yakubovsky is in that city."


Interfax news agency confirmed Yakubovsky had been detained by St. Petersburg police and had been transported to the city but did not give the reasons of the detention.


The agency said policemen had showed Yakubovsky a prosecutor's detention warrant, after which he had ordered his numerous well-armed guards not to offer any resistance.


But Alexander Nizyuk, a spokesman for St. Petersburg police, denied that the city's force was involved.


"I called all our departments including anti-organized crime squad and all of them told me they had not been involved in this operation," Nizyuk said.


In numerous interviews Yakubovsky has asserted that he was given a remote office in the Kremlin in the summer of 1993 and ordered to sift through piles of documents to find evidence of corruption involving Yeltsin's political rivals.


Two of his targets, Yakubovsky said, were Viktor Barannikov and Alexander Rutskoi, then security minister and vice president of Russia respectively. Barannikov was dismissed shortly after Yakubovsky's inquiry began.


But a few days later Yakubovsky fled from Moscow, driving south to avoid scores of security agents sent against him by Barannikov's allies. He turned up later in Armenia, then traveled to Canada, where he had lived in self-imposed exile before being summoned to Moscow by Yeltsin's staff in July last year.


He returned this year to set up a private legal practice which he runs from his dacha in the wealthy Moscow suburb of Zhukovka, guarded 24 hours a day by men with machine guns.


Gulbinsky said Yakubovsky had not carried out any crime.


Consequently, he was not worried about his detention. But a group of lawyers was preparing to defend his boss if it should turn out to be necessary.


"Undoubtedly, he will be freed and those who detained him will be punished," Gulbinsky said.