DRUG COPS HELD IN 3 GRAFT CASES

It's been a rough couple of weeks for drug cops.

Internal affairs officers on Saturday arrested three narcotics
officers and two Moscow policemen on charges of extorting $2,000 from
a Moscow region woman and beating up an undercover cop posing as a
drug dealer.

The suspects, three officers from the Federal Drug Control Service's
Moscow branch and two officers from the Mitino city police precinct,
were arrested in the Moscow region town of Krasnogorsk, a source at
the Interior Ministry's internal affairs department told Kommersant.

Calls to internal affairs for comment went unanswered
Tuesday.

Internal affairs officers were tipped off in January that the suspects
were extorting drug users by threatening prosecution if they did not
pay. They sent an undercover policeman to pose as a drug dealer and
make contacts with Krasnogorsk drug users, telling them he had police
contacts and could help them out of sticky situations, Kommersant said.

On May 12, the suspects detained Krasnogorsk resident Olga Popylyova
and forced her to pay $2,000 by threatening to plant drugs on her, the
report said. They also told her to lead them to other drug contacts.

Thinking the undercover internal affairs officer was actually a
dealer, Popylyova led the suspects to him. They subsequently detained
and beat him until he handed over $2,600 and the keys to his car.

The suspects were arrested two days later, and could face up to seven
years in prison if convicted of abuse of authority.

Kommersant identified the suspects as officers Sergei Protchenko and
Kirill Sazhnev of the Mitino precinct and officers Sergei Porshnev,
Oleg Ulanov and Valery Kurochkin of the Federal Drug Control Service's
Moscow branch. A source in the branch, speaking on condition of
anonymity Tuesday because of the ongoing investigation, confirmed that
three branch officers had been arrested in the case.

The arrests came five days after a Federal Drug Control Service
detective was arrested and charged in Moscow with drug dealing. He was
detained with three grams of heroin, Interfax reported.

In another internal affairs drug bust, a transportation police captain
long suspected of running a drug lab in the Moscow region town of
Podolsk was arrested on May 5 and charged with planting five grams of
heroin on a local resident, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported Saturday.

Upon inspecting the captain's apartment, police found packets of
various illegal substances and vials of heroin and needles in his
refrigerator. The captain had apparently injected heroin shortly
before his arrest, the report said.