Police want to talk to two journalists in connection with a report about Russia's cocaine scandal at its embassy in Argentina

Police investigators want to question two reporters from the independent television station Dozhd, Anastasia Mikhailova and Kogershyn Sagiyeva, in connection with the cocaine-smuggling scandal that rocked Russia’s embassy in Buenos Aires earlier this year (when Argentina law enforcement discovered 880 pounds of coke packed in 12 suitcases hidden inside a school-housing complex attached to the embassy). The journalists’ interrogation is set for July 23. Mikhailova told Mediazona that she doesn’t know why exactly the police want to question her.

Police are apparently interested in a June 28 broadcast, where Mikhailova and Sagiyeva aired “exclusive materials” related to the case and showed a letter from Ali Abyanov, who’s now in pretrial detention, as well as excerpts from police interrogation records and other case materials. Dozhd also shared a letter from the man who allegedly organized the drug smuggling operations, Andrey Kovalchuk (who denies the charges).

Abyanov told Dozhd that the security team for “the embassy’s first secretary, Oleg Vorobyev,” knew that the suitcases were left at the school (Abyanov claims not to have known what was inside the bags). Dozhd says Vorobyev was in Argentina as a seconded FSB officer, and Kovalchuk may have been acting as an “agent” of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service (which was disbanded in 2016).

In 2018, the police charged Dozhd with defamation, after the station aired a segment, titled “Mobsters from the 90s with links to Putin: The secret business empire of Ilya Traber, and how the president’s friends tie in.” Earlier this year, police summoned several Dozhd staff, demanding to know the whereabouts of the station’s former chief editor, Roman Badanin, who is currently studying in the United States.