News

The Bashkortostan Office of the Investigative Committee has finished the investigation against 28-year-old Liana Murzina and 31-year-old Ruslan Baibirdin charged with crimes under Part 3 of Article 163 of the RF Penal Code (extortion), Part 2 of Article 128.1 (slander), Part 2 of Article 137 (invasion of personal privacy).

According to investigators, in late 2014, Murzina, a secretary to a magistrate, learned that she was going to be fired and planned to extort from the magistrate a large sum of money. To do that she hired Baibirdin, an acquaintance of hers. She used the spare key to the safe, and made photocopies of administrative cases and the magistrate’s diary to blackmail him with them. In January 2015, Baibirdin wrote an anonymous letter and arranged for it to be handed to the magistrate in the courthouse. In the letter he demanded 1.5 million rubles otherwise he would publish false information that the Federal Security Service had carried out a number of checks into 9 crimes committed by the magistrate. Not having received any answer to the first letter, the accused sent several more such letters to her enclosing the copies of the documents and the diary. In February 2015, they got a mailbox in the Internet using false personal data and sent slanderous data to her and the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan that the magistrate had passed an illegal decision to stop the proceeding over an administrative violation. In March 2015, Baibirdin found a SIM card registered on the third person and send the magistrate a text demanding to give him money in exchange for the documents, otherwise they would go into mass media. The magistrate reported it to the Bashkortostan Office of the Federal Security Service and all further correspondence was controlled by the operative agents.

Following the demands of the accused, the magistrate took a package with the documents from one of the houses in Kirov Street in Ufa. In exchange she put there a stack of fake money and texted back to the accused. Baibirdin took the fake money and was detained by the agents of the Federal Security Service when leaving the flat.

Baibirdin has been placed in custody pending the trial, while Murzina is under house arrest.

The case has been referred to court.