Alexander Bastrykin

On January 9, 2017, under the Magnitsky Act, the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its Specially Designated Nationals List and blacklisted Aleksandr I. Bastrykin, Andrei K. Lugovoi, Dmitri V. Kovtun, Stanislav Gordievsky, and Gennady Plaksin, which froze any of their assets held by American financial institutions or transactions with those institutions and banned their travelling to the United States.

On 26 July 2012 Russian blogger and anticorruption activist Alexey Navalny published documents indicating that Bastrykin had a residence permit and owned real estate in the Czech Republic. Mr. Navalny wrote that the real estate holding and residence permit in a country belonging to NATO, a military alliance opposed to Russia, should raise questions about Mr. Bastrykin's security clearance for work in law enforcement and access to state secrets.

On November 28, 2009, as head of the Investigative Committee at the scene of the 2009 Nevsky Express bombing, Bastrykin was injured by a second bomb and was hospitalised. The second bomb was reportedly targeted at investigators, and was detonated by mobile phone.

In 2007, President Vladimir Putin established the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's Office, de facto independent from the Prosecutor General's Office, and Bastrykin became its first chairman. The appointment was reportedly instigated by Igor Sechin, wishing to retain his influence after the dismissal of his close ally Vladimir Ustinov from the position of prosecutor general in 2006.

Bastrykin holds a doctor of law degree, and has published more than 100 scholarly works in Russia. In 2007 Bastrykin was publicly accused of plagiarism, because parts of his then new book "Signs of the Hand. Dactyloscopy" (2004) had been rewritten from the famous book of German writer Jürgen Thorwald. In 2013 these accusations were confirmed and supplemented by Dissernet community and its founder Sergei Parkhomenko: it was found that Bastrykin's book also contains an entire chapter from the book by Anthony Summers "The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover" (in Russian translation “The FBI Empire – Myths, Secrets, Intrigues”).

Alexander Bastrykin graduated from the Law Department of Leningrad State University in 1975, and was a university classmate of Vladimir Putin.

Alexander Ivanovich Bastrykin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Бастры́кин , born August 27, 1953, in Pskov) is a Russian official, former First Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia, and former Chairman of The Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's Office. Since January 15, 2011, he is the Head of The Investigative Committee of Russia.