Mikhail Trepashkin, former Russian security service officer, will not be released

A Russian regional court has overturned a lower court's decision to release Mikhail Trepashkin, a lawyer and former Russian security service officer who was convicted of revealing state secrets, his lawyer said Friday.

Trepashkin has claimed that security services fabricated the charges to avenge his investigation into a series of deadly apartment bombings in 1999 that were part of the Kremlin's justification for deploying troops to Chechnya.

Authorities blamed Chechen rebels, but some observers said they suspected security officials of staging the bombings, which killed about 300 people.

The Federal Security Service, or FSB, where Trepashkin worked until 1997, alleged that the former officer was recruited by the British security service MI-5 to collect compromising materials on the explosions with the aim of discrediting the FSB.

Trepashkin arrived in Moscow last month after being freed from prison in the Urals city of Nizhny Tagil, where he was serving four years. His lawyer, Yelena Lipster, said Friday that the regional court in the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals had satisfied prosecutors' appeal of Trepashkin's release.