The Ukrainian patriotic greeting could be heard at the gymnasium on Leontyevskaya Street in Pushkin shortly before noon the day before. Thus, a 25-year-old Petersburger who was detained after an unsuccessful arson of the Historical and Literary Museum called on the FSB, and at the other end of the line, they probably laughed.
According to Fontanka, he does not deny guilt in the attempt on one of the oldest buildings in the city, where the police department was quartered at the beginning of the last century. But the museum was not the first target.
A young man from Kolpino told the investigator about an attempt to escape from debts and revenge imposed on swindlers who allegedly settled in the neighborhood – in the military commissariat of the Pushkin and Kolpinsky districts.
Not in service and not in friendship
According to the suspect, on April 25 he was brought to Pushkin by telephone conversations with those who promised to save him from loans allegedly issued in his name by criminals. There were two interlocutors, they called in turn and hypnotized in no other way. Next: a room at a local hotel, changing SIM cards and phones, taxi rides. For everything, only in cash – so that scammers do not figure it out.
In the early morning of the 26th, they were reassured: the loans were almost sorted out. And then they were taken aback: they say, there is an agenda, are you ready to serve? In the summer, the young man who graduated from the magistracy and continued his studies did not show enthusiasm, and the agenda had already arrived on his smartphone.
However, the interlocutors recovered, and she is the machinations of scammers. The proposal to take revenge, he says, did not inspire. By this time, the “rescuers” had already managed to demand his photographs in the places they needed, and even pictures of the cat with which the graduate student was hiding in the hotel.
Motherland will not forget
Avoid the next task did not work. As he says, poking around the gas station in search of a canister, he nevertheless asked: is it legal? .. The conversation about the Motherland and the “chief swindler”, who allegedly sat down in the military registration and enlistment office, did not add decisiveness.
He refused to burn the building of the Commissariat and the car allegedly belonging to the chief. Probably not the last role in the decision was played by law enforcement officers seen nearby. The team to douse the museum next door with gasoline did not cause such rejection.
The young man was detained less than a kilometer away, on Orangery Street. He admitted that he managed to shout about Ukraine. Expectations that after these code words the FSB would be congratulated on a successful mission did not come true, and the telephone interlocutor interrupted the connection.
Your role is submission
On October 12, 2022, an elderly Petersburger became a defendant in a criminal case of hooliganism with similar circumstances. According to investigators, an unidentified person found a pensioner for the crime. On his instructions, she went to a gas station, bought two liters of fuel, poured it on the carpet in the bank office on Komendantsky Prospekt and set it on fire. Witnesses in the case from among employees of the financial company claim that at the time of the arrest they heard a pro-Ukrainian slogan from her.
As the pensioner later told the family, before the arson, she had been in touch with the “siloviki” for several days, who first deprived her of all her savings (which is about one and a half million rubles), and then forced her to participate in a “special operation”. In a state of stress, relatives say, afraid to tell anyone about what is happening, she bought gasoline on the instructions of the KGB. The meaning of the legend of the scammers boiled down to the fact that some villains had settled in the bank, and while the pensioner was sabotaging the entrance, the persons of interest to counterintelligence had to run away from the fire through the emergency exit, where they were supposedly preparing to detain them.
In early February, a pensioner from Aznakayevo in Tatarstan set fire to a bank. She said that the scammers forced her to take up matches under the pretext of returning 100 thousand rubles.
At the end of January, the mother of a one-month-old baby came to the bank in Cherepovets with the same goal and motivation. But the arson did not take place, they managed to stop it. No cases were reported in both cases.
PS The cat accompanying the graduate student was taken away by the detainee’s relatives.
