Tale of murder spills fake blood in Russia

In television newscasts, a photo of the dark-haired woman was juxtaposed with images of police officers combing the academy’s grounds in a seedy corner of the city, seemingly searching for clues. Members of the faculty and staff at the school, the State Polar Academy, expressed grief and confusion.

They were even more confused the next morning, when Basangova returned to work. The killing had been a ruse. The police said they had staged her death to ensnare her deputy, who had been plotting to kill her.

It is a tale in harmony with this city of Dostoyevsky, where intrigue and dark conspiracy, fictional and real, have been plotted for centuries in the creepy alleyways behind and between the grand imperial facades. It is also another example of why so few people believe the news media or the police in Russia, where official explanations often contain as much fiction as fact.
The police said that the academy, a public postgraduate professional school, was rife with fraud and embezzlement, and Basangova was trying to clean it up. Fearing that her insistence on financial transparency would expose his thievery, the deputy, Vladimir Lukin, hired two of the academy’s groundskeepers to arrange the killing, the police said. They in turn found a killer — who turned out to be a police informant.

“We received information that individuals working in this academy, who were the subject of an audit by Basangova, planned to kill her,” Igor Paradeyev, a detective with the St Petersburg Police Department, told Russian television. “A decision was made to hold an investigative experiment to stage Basangova’s murder.”

The phantom killing took place in a dusty parking lot of the academy. Basangova had just parked her car and was reaching for her purse in the back seat when a man in a black mask wielding a knife ran up, she said in an interview. He pretended to stab her several times, she said, and doused her with fake blood. He ran off while a friend, who was in on the scheme, rushed her to the hospital.

Frightening
“It happened in several seconds, very quickly,” Basangova said, “and though I knew it would be staged, it was very frightening.”

Such elaborate sting operations are not uncommon in Russia, where the police routinely manipulate the news media in criminal investigations, said Yevgeny Vyshenkov, a former police detective here who is now the deputy director of a St Petersburg internet news agency, fontanka.ru. In his previous career, Vyshenkov said, he once had a journalist agree to publish a fake article to coax a suspect to divulge information about accomplices.
In Basangova’s case, the police simply put out a false story and apparently relied on the ensuing publicity to tip off the plotters that the deed had been done. In fact, Basangova said, no one witnessed the putative attack, which raises questions as to why it was enacted or whether it even happened.

Basangova’s account, meanwhile, is vague; she said she would not elaborate on the operation to avoid interfering with the police investigation. She said she was incredulous when the police called her with a tip that Lukin was plotting to kill her.