At first police thought the two bodies found in a ditch in St Petersburg last weekend were those of drunks who had passed out and died of hypothermia.

The case turned out to be far more disturbing. Both men were from Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service, a powerful force of former KGB officers, and they had been poisoned.

The investigators have established that on the night they were killed, Konstantin Druzhenko and Sergei Lomako met a former colleague with contacts in the city’s local government.

After drinking with him and several other people, they left together in the early hours of the morning. They were found dead a few hours later.

“Poison was involved,” said Alexander Mikhailov, the Drug Control Service’s spokesman, “but more tests are needed to determine its nature.”

Some insiders believe the murders could be linked to murky business deals. Others point to a deadly feud that is splitting the Kremlin. The poisonings have come as Russia’s two most powerful secret police bodies are waging a turf war, which on at least two occasions in the past few weeks has threatened to erupt into armed conflict. The St Petersburg murders could be the latest escalation.

Amid uncertainty over who will rule next year, when President Vladimir Putin is due to step down, the rival clans are locked in a struggle for power and assets.

The standoff is between the FSB, the former KGB, which is headed by Nikolai Patrushev, and the Drug Control Service, run by Viktor Cherkesov, which fights organised crime as well as drug trafficking.

Patrushev and Cherkesov are high-ranking former KGB officers who have been close to the Russian president since his days in the Soviet secret police.

Sources say the conflict is as much about financial interests as power: some former KGB figures are said to offer protection to businesses and are involved in money laundering and smuggling.

The fiercest battle is reported to be over control of Russia’s customs organisation. Last month armed FSB officers arrived at one of Moscow’s international airports with orders to arrest Alexander Bulbov, deputy director of the drugs agency, and two of his colleagues as they returned from a business trip.

As the FSB officers, wearing camouflage outfits and black ski masks, waited on the apron for Bulbov to leave the plane, they were confronted by a group of armed men from the Drug Control Service who had been sent to the airport to protect him.

Insults were traded and a scuffle broke out between the rival officers, which almost triggered a gun battle. The FSB arrested Bulbov. In a previous standoff, armed men from the two groups had squared off when FSB officers tried to search Bulbov’s dacha and his wife alerted his men.

In an unprecedented public airing of the conflict, Cherkesov wrote an open letter after his deputy’s arrest, in which he warned: “There can be no winners in this war, there is too much at stake.” The outburst prompted Putin to rebuke his old ally.

Bulbov is accused of ordering illegal telephone taps and accepting protection money. He denies the charges and says his arrest is in revenge for the Drug Control Service’s investigation into Tri Kita, a large furniture business protected by the FSB.

The investigation, which uncovered evidence that Tri Kita managers had bribed FSB officers to smuggle in goods without paying duty, led to the dismissal and arrest of several high-ranking FSB figures last year.

The FSB’s links with Tri Kita were investigated by Yury Shchekochikhin, a liberal MP and journalist. “He received threats but was not intimidated,” said his son Konstantin. “Then suddenly he was unwell.”

Following a short illness which caused his skin to flake and his hair to fall out, Shchekochikhin died in 2003, after “ageing by 20 years in a week”, as a close friend put it.

The autopsy results were never released to his family, which sent samples of his skin to Britain for tests. They revealed that he, too, had been poisoned.

It is suspected he was killed by secret police officers linked to the Tri Kita scandal. Now the investigation into his death is to be reopened, a move some believe is linked to the war between the FSB and the drug agency.

“No investigator will get to the bottom of this unless there is a political will,” said Konstantin.

More about the FSB

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/russia/fsb.htm

Agentura.ru - Lots of articles about the FSB. New York Times article from 2000 calls the website "evenhanded"

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