Denis Yevsyukov, Moscow, Russia.

[Eat Shit And Die]

It's been a year since Denis Yevsyu­kov, a police major, went on a drunken shooting spree at a southern Moscow supermarket after celebrating his birthday at a bar.

He killed two people and wounded seven, and in the subsequent trial, he was locked up for life.

The case became one of the main factors in persuading President Dmitry Medvedev to overhaul the country's law enforcement and justice system.

But Yevsyukov still doesn't remember a single thing about the incident. Two months after the verdict, the three hours that evaporated from Yevsyukov's memory - a lapse that included a meeting with a mysterious man outside the Golden Time Cafe, a trip home, and then the shooting spree - have not been properly investigated, lawyers on both sides of the case say.

A year on, the incident is spawning a whole slew of conspiracy theories about what really pushed Yevsyukov over the edge that night.

"They rushed the trial because they needed a ruling," Yevsyukov's trial lawyer, Tatyana Bushuyeva, told The Moscow News. "The investigation wasn't interested in this episode at all."

Igor Trunov, a renowned lawyer who represented the families of victims of the shooting spree, agreed. "We have a complete vacuum in terms of motives," he said.

"There were certain violations by Yevsyukov that could have resulted in legal measures being taken. After getting information that this could happen, Yevsyukov decided to take revenge against his superiors. That's the version. The question is - who exactly was he taking revenge against? And we have a complete vacuum here. There isn't even a hint."

During the birthday party at the Golden Time Café, he was called outside by an unidentified man. When he returned 15 minutes later, his wife, testifying in court, described him as "pale, then green," staring in a catatonic way at the corner of the table. His condition worsened when they went home, then he put on his uniform and left. The next thing his family heard about him was over the radio.

"The investigation wasn't interested in this episode at all," Bushuyeva said. "They never tried to understand what happened in that interval."
Neither Yevsyukov nor his wife, Karine, (or anyone else at the party) have been able to identify the man who called him outside.

Could the man and what he said have caused Yevsyukov to snap?

Exiled businessman Yevgeny Chichvarkin, the founder of mobile phone company Evroset, has his own theory of what happened.

On the surface, a connection between Chichvarkin and Yevsyukov would seem implausible.

But that tangled connection is exactly what Chichvarkin, awaiting an extradition hearing in London on charges of kidnapping Andrei Vlaskin, has suggested recently.

[Eat Shit And Die]

CCTV cams caught the Moscow police major who shot dead three people and wounded another six in a Moscow supermarket on April 28, 2009
An off-duty police Captain opened fire in a supermarket in southern Moscow on 6/23/2009, killing at least three people and wounding six.
During the night Denis Yevsyukov had a fight with his wife in a bar at his 32^nd birthday party and had a nervous breakdown,' a city police spokeswoman said.
She said he then went on a shooting spree in the supermarket, randomly spraying bullets at passers-by after first returning home to change into his police uniform.
Yevsyukov is shown loading his gun in the all-night shop. He killed at least three people and wounded seven.

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Chichvarkin's version

According to the theory proposed by Chichvarkin in a Novaya Gazeta article, Yevsyukov got a mysterious phone call during the birthday party that left him catatonic.

With officers at his precinct under investigation for fabricating theft charges against a disgraced mobile phone salesman who wound up kidnapped and chained to a radiator by his own employers, the gist of the call apparently was, "You're next." According to Chichvarkin, that's what sent Yevsyukov over the edge.

"Investigators tried to annul the fact that Andrei Vlaskin was a thief and a bandit," Chichvarkin wrote in the article. "The weakest link was the Southern Police District," in particular Denis Yevsyukov, who had once instigated a search against Vlaskin on Evroset's complaint.

"The idea was to force everyone involved in the instigation of the criminal case against Vlaskin to admit that Evroset employees bribed the whole department, that they fabricated all the evidence, intimidated witnesses with only one aim: to kidnap [Vlaskin]."

Chichvarkin suspects that the call to Yevsyukov was connected to pressure from investigators trying to discredit Yevsyukov and other officers in the Southern Police District to corroborate their evidence against Chichvarkin.

"Why would a normal person like Yevsyukov suddenly go on a shooting rampage?" Yuri Gervis, Chichvarkin's lawyer, told The Moscow News. "The investigation hasn't answered these questions and doesn't want to answer them, and Yevsyukov is silent about what made him do this."

Earlier that year, prosecutors investigating the Vlaskin case found documents dumped in the garbage outside, causing a scandal in the Southern Police District. Police announced that the department would be checked, and on April 22, just four days before Yevsyukov's shooting spree, reports appeared about the resignation of two district officials.

"In March, two FSB agents were attached to investigators conducting a probe of the Southern Police District department" in connection with the instigation of the Vlaskin case, Gervis said, citing his own sources which he would not disclose. "There was pressure, there were demands to hand [over] their superiors," and Yevsyukov may have been facing this pressure as well.
Meanwhile, Yevsyukov was reportedly questioned about the alleged cover-up in July, long after his arrest on murder charges, but he did not testify.

Bushuyeva, who became Yevsyukov's lawyer later on in the investigation, revealed another interesting detail: Yevsyukov shared a cell with the director of Evroset's security service, Boris Levin - the same person who was arrested in Sept. 2008 on charges of kidnapping Vlaskin.

"I haven't talked to Denis about [the Chichvarkin connection]. But I do know for a fact that one of his cellmates was the former head of Evroset's security department," Bushuyeva said. "But I don't know his last name. Denis told me this. He said that even when he was transferred to another cell, it was still with the head of Evroset's security department. This was in December, right before the trial began."

Gervis said he did not know they were in the same cell.

But Mikhail Vokin, the lawyer who was representing Yevsyukov at the time when reports about his being questioned appeared, denied any link, or that Yevsyukov was in any way connected to the Vlaskin case.

"He was not questioned about the Chichvarkin affair. He did not initiate a search against Vlaskin. That has been established by the investigation." Asked if this meant that there had been an investigation into this issue, Vokin said, "Apparently, yes." But when pressed to elaborate, Vokin said he was under oath not to disclose aspects of the investigation.
Others were also sceptical about Chichvarkin's allegations.

"With all the respect I have for Chichvarkin, it sounds contrived," said Trunov. Considering that Chichvarkin is in London under investigation, there is no evidence of these allegations to present in court, he said, adding: "So I'm not even bothering my head with it."

Law enforcement experts say that a bigger question is how Yevsyukov got involved in the first place.

"Knowing how the system works, it's hard to imagine that Yevsyukov just picked up the case for his own benefit," said Kirill Kabanov, a former security officer and the head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, suggesting that normally money is involved in launching such cases. "If the case was in the Southern Police District's jurisdiction, then why did they have to throw out the documents? Since Evroset is all over Moscow, it all depends on [what police district] you strike a deal with."

Chichvarkin, who had joined Pravoye Delo, a liberal party seen to be loyal to the Kremlin, has been a vocal advocate for the rights of entrepreneurs. He has claimed that a planned take-over of his business is the real reason he is being prosecuted, and accused Interior Ministry officials of trying to extort millions of dollars for letting him import mobile phones. Chichvarkin wrote in his Livejournal blog on March 2 that he no longer wants to be associated with Pravoye Delo because he has little chance to participate from London.

In 2008, Chichvarkin was in talks with the MTS provider to sell his burgeoning retail business, and some media, notably Newsweek Russia, linked the investigation against Chichvarkin to MTS's attempts to take control of Evroset. But MTS has denied any connection.

Evroset was eventually sold in late 2008 to MTS's rival, Vimpelcom.

One expert, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue, said Chichvarkin may have brought up the Yevsyukov connection to improve his reputation as he awaits an extradition hearing, scheduled for August.

But whatever its effect on Yevsyukov, the link, a mere footnote to the Chichvarkin case, is revealing just how corrupt the daily grind of the rank-and-file within the police force really is.
Bushuyeva did not deny the Chichvarkin connection. "This is all very interesting," she said. "If he really was connected to Chichvarkin's case, this raises a lot of questions that we don't have answers to."

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The ‘hypnosis' theory

Another theory that rests on what caused Yevsyukov to flip is that proposed by lawyer Yury Smykov, who represented other victims of Yevsyukov and who says an informant who identified himself as Alexander revealed a plot to take down the entire Interior Ministry by "hypnotising" Yevsyukov into going on the shooting spree.

Smykov, who said he himself thought that Yevsyukov was definitely not himself in the video footage shown of him in the supermarket, describes how he heard an audio recording detailing what transpired before the shooting.

Yevsyukov was apparently "programmed" by someone who put psychotropic substances in his drink during the party, Smykov said. Then, after visiting his apartment, he was picked up by an ambulance, given more substances, and hypnotised. Then he was let out of the ambulance, caught a cab that took him to the supermarket, shot the driver, and began shooting at others.
"As I was told, there was a plot... to take down [Interior Minister] Rashid Nurgaliyev," Smykov said, and Yevsyukov was just the kind of person the conspirators needed - brooding, quiet, and also corrupt.

Smykov testified in court, but was not taken seriously otherwise. Bushuyeva dismissed the theory as merely amusing, but said that Smykov may have been raising the right questions.
Yevsyukov, she said, had been diagnosed with psychopathic tendencies in childhood, while epilepsy ran in his family. He had been known to have memory lapses before. While medical tests found only alcohol in his blood, she says a proper investigation into other substances - or other forms of pressure - was never really conducted.

"Someone could have put something into his drink, just out of malice," she said.

And where that malice came from was another unanswered question.

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Time line of events

1997 - Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a 20-something mobile phone salesman, invests $2,500 and founds Evroset

Summer 2003 - Evroset files a complaint to the Southern Police District about one of its employees, Andrei Vlaskin, for reportedly stealing shipments of imported mobile phones and selling them on the market. Denis Yevsyukov, then an investigator, issues a search for Vlaskin, various sources say. Vlaskin testifies that he did in fact steal mobile phones from Evroset. On two occasions, Vlaskin orders assaults on a Evroset employee asked to look after Vlaskin.

Dec. 2003 - According to investigators, Vlaskin is detained by police in Tambov and brought to Moscow. Alexander Kurta, an officer of the Southern Police District, hands over Vlaskin to Evroset's security team who were waiting outside the precinct. They included Evroset vice president and head of security Boris Levin, and his employees, Alexei Olesik and Vladimir Ilyin. Vlaskin alleges he was held for two weeks in a Moscow apartment, chained to a radiator and occasionally beaten. But according to Chichvarkin's lawyer, Yuri Gervis, Vlaskin asked for an apartment and was provided one by Evroset.

Summer 2005 - A high-profile criminal probe curbs a widespread practice whereby Sheremetyevo customs officials would demand bribes for duty discounts and expedited documentation.

Summer 2005 - Law enforcement launches a criminal probe, accusing Evroset of importing contraband phones.

Fall 2005 - German Gref, then the Economic Development Minister, holds a meeting with leading mobile phone retailers. They go clean and start paying full duties on their cell phone imports, and Gref orders customs officials to provide documents in time. Costing up to $700 million a year (24 per cent of the import cost), this practice is more expensive, but more transparent. Chichvarkin's Evroset, in a bid to become more transparent and prepare for a future IPO, becomes one of the first companies to adopt it.

March 2006 - As part of the criminal probe against Evroset, officials from the Interior Ministry's K Department - which oversees crimes involving information technology - impound 167,500 Motorolas destined for Evroset stores at Sheremetyevo Airport. Chichvarkin would later allege that an official from the K department, Konstantin Machabeli, demanded $10 million to resolve the problem. But the mobile phones checked out - they were neither contraband nor fake.

July 2006 - According to Evroset sources cited by Newsweek, Motorola complained to the US State Department, and President George Bush brought up the issue with President Vladimir Putin at the July G8 summit. President Vladimir Putin ordered Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and Gref to settle the problem. The criminal probe against Evroset continues, but a separate case is launched against officials of the Interior Ministry's K Department for illegally impounding the Motorola phones.

2007 - Vladimir Knyazev, an officer from the K Department, is fined 50,000 roubles. Knyazev would continue to work for the Interior Ministry, and in 2009 would become one of the key investigators working on the case against Chichvarkin.

Fall 2007 - Evroset signs an agreement with MTS, allowing MTS users to pay for their mobile charges at Evroset stores.

April 2008 - Reports appear that Chichvarkin is negotiating to sell Evroset to MTS. The reports are not officially confirmed until AFK Sistema chief Vladimir Yevtushenkov admits that MTS, which is part of his holding, is interested in buying the retail chain as part of a consortium of investors.

August 2008 - Investigators renew efforts in the 2005 contraband probe against Evroset. Andrei Vlaskin is now questioned as a witness in this case.

Sept. 2, 2008 - Masked men from the Prosecutor General's Office raid Evroset headquarters as part of the criminal probe. That day, Evroset's security department head, Boris Levin, is arrested on charges of kidnapping Andrei Vlaskin in 2003. The investigation against Chichvarkin on accusations of kidnapping begins.

Sept. 23, 2008 - Alexander Mamut agrees to purchase cash-strapped Evroset for $400 million. By that point, Evroset has accumulated $950 million in debt. Mamut then sells 49.9 per cent of the shares to Vimpelcom, which controls the Beeline service provider and which is MTS' main competitor.

Jan. 2009 - Chichvarkin is charged with extortion and organizing a kidnapping, along with Boris Levin. Tipped off by a friend who found out about his pending arrest, Chichvarkin is whisked off to Domodedovo Airport, lying down in the back seat of a car so that police, lying in wait, don't see him.

Feb. 2009 - Investigators from the Prosecutor General's Office, as part of their investigation against Chichvarkin, arrive at the Southern District Police Department looking for the 2003 case against Andrei Vlaskin. They cannot find what they are looking for, but Kommersant reports that investigators find several boxes containing criminal cases near garbage bins outside the precinct.

The criminal cases in the boxes involved charges of theft against Vlaskin and were marked as closed, but there was no documented confirmation of this, a police source told Rosbalt news agency.

April 1, 2009 - Evroset customer payment agreement with MTS expires. MTS, which claims Evroset failed to pay 1.1 billion roubles for previous mobile charges, is not satisfied that Evroset can pay back the debt and continue paying on time. Evroset continues to accept payment for MTS, while MTS warns it has stopped accepting payments through Evroset stores. The disagreement escalates into virulent PR attacks on both sides.

April 2009 - The Southern Police District department is investigated, while reports about the resignation of top officials, including Southern Police District chief Yury Ageyev and others, appear in news agencies on April 20 and April 22.

The night of April 26-27, 2009 - Major Denis Yevsyukov, head of the Tsaritsyno police precinct, goes on a shooting spree in a supermarket, killing two and wounding seven. While in custody, he is questioned about the Vlaskin investigation, but does not provide any evidence.

July 2009 - Police charge Alexander Kurte, a former police officer of the Southern Police District, with kidnapping Andrei Vlaskin.

Oct. 2009 - The Interior Ministry pledges to investigate claims by Chichvarkin that a Department K official, Konstantin Machabeli, tried to extort millions of dollars.

Dec. 24, 2009 - Medvedev announces a big reform of the Interior Ministry.

Dec. 28, 2009 - Yevsyukov's trial begins.

Jan. 2010 - Andrei Latysh, another Department K official wanted for impounding the Motorolas, turns himself in. An investigation is still pending.

Feb. 2010 - Yevsyukov is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

[DMP]

Aspects of the story such as the phone call/drink spiking and the trance like state remind me of MK-Ultra.

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MK-ULTRA?

[DMP]

MK-ULTRA?

OK - so, if you haven't heard of MK-ULTRA, do a search on it. I think you'd find it interesting. It's along the lines of government experimentation/manchurian candidate type stuff. Not saying I believe it all (although records of the program have been legitimized) but, it's interesting nonetheless.

[DMP]

MK-ULTRA?

OK - so, if you haven't heard of MK-ULTRA, do a search on it. I think you'd find it interesting. It's along the lines of government experimentation/manchurian candidate type stuff. Not saying I believe it all (although records of the program have been legitimized) but, it's interesting nonetheless.

And yes - pretty much all of my interests are on the darkside.

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