Moscow, 19 February: Investigators from the Russian prosecution service last year instituted over 1,000 criminal cases, some of them corruption-related, against the so-called persons with a special legal status, which means prosecutors, judges and deputies of various levels.

"More than 1,000 cases of this kind were launched last year, a third of them since the creation of the Investigations Committee (IC) under the prosecution service of the Russian Federation," committee chairman Aleksandr Bastrykin said on Tuesday (19 February) in his address to the meeting of the extended board of the Prosecutor-General's Office of the Russian Federation.

He said that 511 of these criminal cases had already been sent to courts, including 202 criminal cases in the four months of operation of the IC.

Altogether, Bastrykin said, more than 87,000 criminal cases had been handled by investigators since September last year, when the IC was formed.

"In its four months of operation, more than 34,000 criminal cases, or 90 per cent of all the completed ones, were sent to courts throughout Russia. Criminal proceedings were instituted against more than 38,000 people," the IC head said.

Speaking of the structure of the cases investigated, Bastrykin said that dominant among them were cases involving murder (more than 6,000), deliberately inflicted grievous bodily harm (4,000) and rape (2,000).

Over the past five months, "pretty good results have been achieved by the Main Investigations Directorate of the IC", the committee head said, meaning investigations into the most high-profile criminal cases.

Investigators from this section have completed investigations against 83 people in 28 criminal cases, 20 of which have already been sent to courts. "These include the case of the murder of Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Andrey) Kozlov and his driver, in which Vip-Bank owner (Aleksey) Frenkel and four accomplices have faced trial; the high-profile long-running case of furniture smuggling at the Tri Kita and Grand retail centres, in which there are nine defendants," Bastrykin said.

Moreover, he said, IC investigators have identified and solved in the course of their investigations nearly 3,000 crimes not recorded before.

"One of the serious tasks is to solve grave and particularly grave crimes from earlier years, including more than 90,000 murders," Bastrykin said. He said that more than 100 such crimes had been solved in four months.

In view of the increasing frequency of attempts of the lives of investigators and other law enforcement staff, the IC head said that there were plans to set up internal security and physical protection subunits, but more jobs had to be created in the staffing structure. "We believe that the expenditure will be justified. The problems that requires a particularly fast solution is ensuring the safety of those involved in the criminal law process in the Southern Federal District," Bastrykin said.