OREANDA-NEWS. Three men were detained in Moscow on suspicion of searching for personal data intended for use in the investigations of politician Alexei Navalny. This was reported by Russian media TASS on Monday, November 1, citing an unnamed source in law enforcement agencies.

According to the information provided, the detainees Pyotr Katkov, Alexander Zelentsov and Igor Zaitsev, using, among other things, false documents of police officers, were searching for data of individuals on the darknet, for which they received fees.

The men are accused of forgery of documents and violation of the secrecy of telephone conversations. At the same time, the detainees claim that they did not know who they were collecting information for.

According to the media BAZA, the defendants who opened a detective agency in 2020 received the billing of FSB employees whom Navalny blamed for his poisoning, and also learned their phone numbers.

According to the information of The Insider, Bellingcat, CNN Der Spiegel, published according to the results of their journalistic investigation at the end of 2020, eight FSB operatives who have been spying on him since 2017 may be involved in the poisoning of Navalny. They also followed the politician to Tomsk, where he was before he became ill.

After that, Navalny released a recording of a telephone conversation with one of the defendants in the investigation, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, during which he actually confessed to his participation in the operation to poison the Russian opposition leader.