The Kremlin is thought to have been angered by a recent decision to expand the BBC World Service’s Russian language output The BBC has launched an investigation to establish whether an episode of Sherlock was deliberately leaked from within the offices of a Russian state broadcaster by the Kremlin. Sunday night’s hotly-anticipated series finale called The Final Problem was circulated on the internet ahead of transmission at the weekend, leading to many fans seeing pictures of the return of villain Jim Moriarty on social media. The show’s producer Sue Vertue was even forced to beg fans on Twitter not to share or watch the leaked version. A Russian-language version of the 90-minute episode appeared online on Saturday. It featured a three-second continuity announcement identifying it as having originated from Channel One, which holds the rights to air Sherlock in Russia. Analysts think the leak could form part of Russia’s threat to retaliate against the BBC . The Kremlin is thought to have been angered by a recent decision to expand the BBC World Service’s Russian language output, and also threatened reprisals against the corporation after a short-lived attempt by NatWest to close bank accounts linked to Russia’s English language broadcaster, RT. In October a spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry said that the abortive attempt to close RT’s accounts “reeked of” the BBC, claiming that state-owned Natwest was acting to help Britain’s national broadcaster. The spokeswoman warned: “Our stance is straightforward: we will stick up for our own. They [Britain] will get as good as they give.” BBC Worldwide, which sells the corporation’s content overseas, said it was now conducting an investigation” into the leak, which analysts suggested could have been deliberately orchestrated to damage the British broadcaster. In a statement they said: “BBC Worldwide takes breaches of our stringent content security protocols very seriously and we have initiated a full investigation into how this leak has occurred.” Western security officials have recently warned of Russia’s increasing use of cyber attacks, which have included the hacking of Democratic Party emails during the US election campaign last year. Ben Nimmo, information defence fellow at the Atlantic Council thinktank, said: “There appears to be no profit motive, no benefit to the broadcaster from doing this. What remains is a political motive. The most obvious explanation is that this is punitive.” Lilit Gevorgyan, senior economist at IHS Global Insight, said: “There has been a pattern of Russia making shortterm tactical gains at the expense of long-term strategic losses, so we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that this is a deliberate act.” The BBC is understood to have upgraded its file security for its TV output after scripts and unfinished footage from Doctor Who were leaked from the Miami office of BBC Worldwide in 2014. The series final of Sherlock drew its lowest-ever overnight UK ratings on Sunday night. Around 5.9m tuned in to watch Benedict Cumberbatch in The Final Problem, down from the 8.1m who watched the first episode on New Year’s Day. However, viewing figures will be higher when on-demand services are taken into account. The second episode has now been watched by a consolidated audience of 9.5m which is up 3.5m on the overnight audience. More than 11 million viewers watched the episode broadcast on New Year’s Day once consolidated figures were taken into account, making it the biggest audience of the festive period.
