A Russian official has has cast doubt on the first moon landings and demanded an investigation into what really happened after original Nasa footage of the event disappeared.

Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Russian government's Investigative Committee, says he wants an inquiry after the video from 1969 and a piece of lunar rock, which was brought back to earth, went missing.

In an opinion piece in the Russian newspaper Izvestia, Mr Markin says that such an inquiry is vital to reveal new insights into the historical space journey.

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Russian official Vladimir Markin has demanded an investigation into the first moon landing after original footage of the event went missing

According to the translation in the Moscow Times, Mr Markin claimed Russia were ‘not contending that they did not fly (to the moon) and simply made a film about it.'

But his comments are certain to be seen as a deliberate attempt to suggest there is reason to doubt the lunar landing was real – especially as he also attacked the US investigation into FIFA corruption.

It also comes despite Nasa admitting six years ago that the footage no longer existed after accidentally being erased.

Mr Markin said: 'All of these scientific - or perhaps cultural - artefacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss.

'An investigation will reveal what happened.'

In 2009, Nasa said that it it probably erased its only high resolution images of the first moonwalk to make room for electronic data from a satellite.

It means the only original pictures that remain from the mission are the snowy, grainy images of Neil Armstrong's 'giant leap for mankind'.

Speaking at the time, Dick Nafzger, a video engineer at Nasa said: 'The inescapable conclusion is that the recordings are no longer.

In an opinion piece in the Russian newspaper Izvestia, Mr Markin says that such an inquiry is vital to reveal new insights into historical space journeys

'I don’t think anyone in the Nasa organisation did anything wrong. It slipped through the cracks, and nobody’s happy about it.'

His findings follow an exhaustive four-year search through archives and tens of thousands of boxes stored in dusty basements for 45 so-called 'lost tapes' from the Apollo 11 mission.

Also in his opinion piece, Mr Markin criticised the U.S. for launching a corruption probe into officials at football's world governing body, Fifa.

He wrote of how American prosecutors had 'declared themselves as supreme arbiters of international football' adding they had 'confused political bargaining with corruption'.