Illegal Channel of Sending Terrorists to
West Checked in Russia

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti) — As a result of special operation, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Moscow Main Interior Department (GUVD) have put an end the activity of a criminal group, which had organized an illegal channel for sending foreigners to France, Spain and the USA.

"There are proofs that a number of the persons, sent to the West, belonged to terrorist organizations," chief of the FSB public relations center Sergei Ignatchenko told reporters.

According to him, it was established during the operative measures that the organizers of the criminal group were Russian citizens Karen Gevorkyan and Dmitry Kedrov. They have already been detained.

"In the course of four years the criminal group have sent abroad over a thousand people," Mr. Ignatchenko said.

According to him, mostly citizens of Moldova, Ukraine, the Trans-Caucasian and Southeast Asian countries were illegal migrants.

"Beginning with 2001, up to ten people on an average passed through this illegal channel every week," Mr. Ignatchenko said. He specified that these illegal migrants were sent by transit through the Moscow region.

On April 5 during the inspection of Gevorkyan and Kedrov’s apartments and offices the FSB and GUVD officers found a great amount of forged Russian foreign passports, foreign visas, forged stamps of the Russian Interior Ministry’s passport and visa service and the FSB’s bodies of frontier control. Apart from that, the found documents included migration cards, stamped by border control bodies and the lists of the persons illegally sent to the West by this criminal group. "These lists contain also the names of the persons from Chechnya," Mr. Ignatchenko said.