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Blogger Discovers Abandoned Moscow Police Station With Hundreds of Passports

Lana Sator / Instagram

A Moscow-based blogger has discovered a trove of passports and other personal documents inside an abandoned police station that drew social media attention and triggered an investigation into negligence.

Lana Sator, who describes herself as a documentarian of old buildings in and around the city, posted photographs of case files and passports inside a drab building in Moscow. Black-and-white portraits of President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev were seen taped next to a decaying windowsill in the building.

“Actually, as a matter of fact, the derelict building is utterly dull,” Sator wrote on her LiveJournal blog on Friday.

Her post drew the attention of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which announced an inspection into criminal negligence of duty. The committee said in a statement that the building had previously housed an office of the Federal Migration Service, an agency that was dissolved in 2016.

A post shared by Lana Sator (@lanasator) on

In her original Instagram post, Sator remarked that the discovery suggest that the authorities had breached the Law on Personal Data.

“A nondescript abandoned building with broken windows and a gloomy courtyard. It's strange that homeless people hadn't settled there yet,” Sator wrote.

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