The upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, said Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Bastrykin will assume the post on September 7, when a law on establishing the committee comes into force. Until that date, he will be its acting director.
Under the law to establish the Investigation Committee, adopted by the lower house, the State Duma, on May 11 and approved by Senators on May 25, the committee will be subordinate to the Prosecutor General's Office, and will comprise a Main Investigation Department, as well as regional and special investigation departments.
These investigation bodies will focus on the pre-trial investigations of criminal cases currently within the competence of investigators of the Prosecutor General's Office.
Bastrykin, born in 1953 in northwest Russia, is a trained lawyer. In 2001-2005 he was deputy head of the Russian Justice Ministry's federal department for the Northwest Federal District in St. Petersburg. In 2006 he was appointed head of the Interior Ministry's Main Department for the Central Federal District.
After his appointment, the official said a Russian Unified Investigation Committee uniting all investigation bodies could be created in the future. "If everything goes according to plan, this would be in a matter of a few years," he said.
Bastrykin also told journalists that Russian experts would soon be able to conduct a forensic examination of the radioactive poison that killed Alexander Litvinenko, a former Federal Security Service officer, in London last year, and would be able to identify where it came from, despite the minute size of the samples available.
"Our experts encountered a purely technical problem - they were not ready to examine such a small amount of this toxic agent. But this problem will be resolved soon, and we'll be able to carry out an examination," he said.
The murder of Litvinenko, who received British citizenship shortly before his death in November 2006, has strained relations between Russia and the United Kingdom.
