"We have a suspicion that his phone lines were tapped," Sergei Bogdanov said in a telephone interview, adding, "We have several appropriate pieces of circumstantial evidence" of such tapping.
Although Bogdanov refused to cite specific evidence, he noted that Kholodov, a reporter for Moskovsky Komsomolets, had been blown up by the briefcase bomb two hours after a phone conversation with an informant in the counterintelligence service. The informant had told him to pick up at a train station a briefcase containing documents linking the leadership of the Western Group of the Russian Army in Germany with illegal arms deals.
"A logical conclusion follows that someone tapped his phone," Bogdanov said, since the briefcase was booby-trapped. He declined to say whether the service itself, which is involved in the investigation of the killing, had tapped Kholodov's telephone lines.
Bogdanov said six government offices have the right to tap telephone lines: the counterintelligence service, the tax police, the Interior Ministry, the Customs Office, the Presidential Guard's Department and the Guard Department of the Russian Federation.
"Nevertheless, permission to tap the phone must be given by a prosecutor," he said. "And a prosecutor gives such permission only after he receives plausible evidence that a serious crime is being planned."
But Segodnya newspaper reported that not only Kholodov's phone had been tapped. It maintained that the lines of most newspapers were being tapped. The daily newspaper did not cite a source for the information.
Kholodov had been investigating corruption at top levels of the military before he was killed Monday after collecting the briefcase from the baggage check at Kazansky railway station following the call from the contact at the service.
An official also said Defense Minister Pavel Grachev had asked the General Prosecutor's Office to sue Moskovsky Komsomolets journalists for libel over their accusations that Grachev was involved in corruption with the Western Group and also implicated in Kholodov's death.
Interfax news agency reported that the State Duma had voted to summon Grachev to report Wednesday to the parliament on the incident and the allegations of military corruption.
In another crime development, police said they have arrested six suspects over the April 26 killing of Andrei Aizderdzis, a State Duma deputy and former head of the MDK wholesale trade corporation.
Alexei Popov, an officer on duty in a local police station, said by phone that two other suspects, who police believe carried out the killing, are abroad. Popov said all the suspects were employees of the security department of MDK. Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported that Aizderdzis had fired the employees.
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