The official authorities of the country are silent, and the head of state, Milos Zeman, is unavailable - he is recovering from a serious illness.
Gennady Charodeyev
In the meantime, journalists from the Czech publications Radiožurnál and Respekt.cz took up the case, who found out that the investigators in charge of the Vrbetica bombings wanted to check some facts from the secret report, but to their surprise it turned out that the document was destroyed.
According to BBC News, information about the visit of employees of the National Center for Combating Organized Crime of the Czech Republic to the Office of the President is confirmed on the official website of the administration. But it does not say anything about the purpose of the visit, but it is already known that the detectives wanted to check if someone else had access to the BIS counterintelligence report on the GRU sabotage in 2014. However, the document was not found in the office and an investigation is underway.
The Czech government has said it suspects two Russian agents, Petrov (Alexander Mishkin) and Boshirov (Anatoly Chepiga), who were accused by British authorities of attempting to poison former GRU operative Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018, were involved in the bombings.
According to the testimony of members of the Office of the President cited by Czech Radio, the secret message, in which the names of two known GRU agents appear, was most likely "accidentally destroyed" along with some other documents.
The head of the presidential administration, Vratislav Mynar, did not confirm or deny the destruction of the document to the Czech media, but said that no outsiders like Petrov and Boshirov could get access to it.
Amid allegations by the media of non-compliance with security rules and speculation that the document was destroyed illegally, the office of the President issued another statement. It says that the report was delivered to the presidential administration on April 7, 2021, it “was duly registered and brought to the attention of the Secretariat of the President of the Republic.” On the morning of April 13, the document was handed over personally to President Zeman.
The office insists on its own: the destruction of documents is carried out only by persons with access to state secrets, in strict accordance with the protocol and under the supervision of a special commission.
Some of the officials shrug their shoulders: “The Russians in Prague have a whole network of “sleeping” agents. Sometimes they wake up and steal secret reports”.
Military expert, reserve colonel Nikolay Eliseyev, told NI: in the expert community, many believe that the Czechs never had any secret report with evidence, and everything else is “pure staging.” This document was never presented to the media, because it was, of course, secret. But it was announced and this created a kind of false reality, which, however, had to be reckoned with, and then something to do. To refute or tell the truth about the GRU's innocence in sabotage at military depots would be a painful blow to the reputation of the Czech Republic itself.
- Many today are inclined to the version that the explosions were organized by people hired by the Bulgarian arms baron Yemilyan Gebrev, who is still the official supplier of weapons for Syrian militants and the National Guard of Ukraine. He could use the warehouse fire to cover up the "disappearance" of hundreds of tons of explosives, ammunition, and weapons. In fact, it has long been "fighting" somewhere in the Donbass or the Middle East, - said the military expert.
Czech Radio recalled: in 2014, in the village of Vrbetice, 350 kilometers from Prague, explosions occurred in two ammunition depots, as a result of which two people died. Seven years later, the incident, not too well known outside the country, turned into an international scandal, during which the Czech authorities accused the Russian special services of being involved in the explosions.
On April 17, 2021, the Czech police put two Russian citizens Petrov and Boshirov on the wanted list in connection with the commission of a serious crime. The police website reported that they moved around the country using several different passports - in the name of Tajik citizen Ruslan Tobarov and Moldovan citizen Nikolai Popa, as well as Russian ones - in the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.
On the same day, Prague announced the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats due to suspicions that Russian intelligence services were involved in the explosion. Russia responded by expelling 20 employees of the Czech embassy.
Recently, Czech Radio reported that the investigation into the case of the explosions in Vrbetica has a new defendant - the owner of a Czech passport living in Greece, a former Russian soldier Nikolay Shaposhnikov. In an interview with the Czech media, Shaposhnikov denied that he could be connected with the GRU.