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Secret services given rights to eliminate terrorists abroad

On June 28, Putin ordered Russia’s secret services to find and kill the insurgents responsible for kidnapping and killing Russian embassy employees in Iraq. Patrushev, then FSB director, stated that the special services would do everything possible to eliminate the terrorists: “We should ensure that any terrorist who has committed a crime will not avoid the responsibility,”he said. Patrushev added: “This is not a casual assignment. It is in the logic of what we do [i.e., how counterterrorism is understood by the Russian secret services].”

Although it was presented in news reports as an emotional re- action to the diplomats’ murders, Russia’s policy of carrying out assassinations abroad had been under preparation for some time. The Russian parliament spent months discussing the new legislative initiative that allows the FSB to kill terrorists on foreign soil. The first draft of the bill, according to Mikhail Grishankov, a deputy chairman of the Security Committee at the State Duma, was presented to the Duma in March of 2006. It took only a week following Putin’s declaration of retribution in Iraq before the State Duma and Federation Council approved foreign assassinations by intelligence agencies. The federal law was approved by the Duma on July 5, and the special decision of the Federation Council (the upper house of the Russian Parliament) was approved on July 7, 2006. According to this package of antiterrorism bills, the president could now order Russian spetsnaz or intelligence groups to conduct operations in foreign countries.