Mikhail Ivanovich Trepashkin is a Russian attorney and former Federal Security Service colonel who was invited by MP Sergei Kovalev to assist in an independent inquiry of the Russian apartment bombings in September 1999 that followed the Dagestan war and were one of the causes of the Second Chechen War.
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Mikhail Trepashkin's arrest has been criticized by a number of human rights organizations and he has been called a political prisoner.
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Mikhail Trepashkin started working for the KGB in 1984 as an investigator of underground trade in stolen art.
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At the beginning of the 1990s, Mikhail Trepashkin moved to the Internal Affairs department of the FSB, where he worked for Nikolai Patrushev.
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Mikhail Trepashkin investigated connections of FSB officers with criminal groups.
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Mikhail Trepashkin won a medal for intercepting a plane-load of weapons sold by FSB officers to Chechen rebels.
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In 1995, Mikhail Trepashkin got involved in the Bank Soldi affair, described by Scott Anderson in a 2009 GQ article.
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Mikhail Trepashkin was working on an FSB sting operation against a bank extortion ring linked to Salman Raduyev, a Chechen rebel who was then fighting against Russia in the First Chechen War.
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In 1997, Mikhail Trepashkin wrote a letter to President Boris Yeltsin attempting to bring light to the case and corruption in the FSB.
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Mikhail Trepashkin resigned from the FSB, successfully sued its leadership, and got a job with the tax police.
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Mikhail Trepashkin was invited by MP Sergei Kovalev to assist in an independent inquiry of the Russian apartment bombings.
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Two sisters whose mother was killed in one of the houses hired Mikhail Trepashkin to represent them in the trial of two Russian Muslims accused of transporting explosives for the bombings.
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Mikhail Trepashkin claimed that the man turned out to be an FSB member named Vladimir Romanovich, the same man he claimed had been working for criminals in the Moscow Bank Soldi raid of 1995.
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Mikhail Trepashkin said that a witness identified only the first of the 2 composite images distributed by the official investigation.
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Mikhail Trepashkin was convicted by a closed military court to four years for revealing state secrets.
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In September 2005, after serving two years of his sentence, Mikhail Trepashkin was released on parole, but two weeks later was re-arrested after the State appealed the parole decision.
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Mikhail Trepashkin investigated a letter attributed to Achemez Gochiyayev and found that the alleged Gochiyayev's assistant who arranged the delivery of sacks might have been vice-president of Kapstroi-2000 Kormishin, originally from Vyazma.
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On 30 November 2007, Mikhail Trepashkin was freed with the expiration of his four-year prison term.
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Case of Mikhail Trepashkin caught the attention of the Western press, caused an uproar among human rights campaigners, was put on record by Amnesty International, mentioned by the US State Department and featured in an award-winning documentary Disbelief.
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Mikhail Trepashkin claimed that FSB had plans to kill relatives of Litvinenko in Moscow in 2002, although these have not been carried out.
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Mikhail Trepashkin claimed that supervisors and people from the FSB promised not to send him to the prison if only he leaves the Sergei Kovalev commission and start working with the FSB "against Litvinenko".
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Mikhail Trepashkin continues to his work as a lawyer and participates in human rights activism.
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In March 2010, Mikhail Trepashkin signed the online anti-Putin manifesto of the Russian opposition "Putin must go".
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