Russia’s security service says jailed American leaked biotechnology secrets
Al Jazeera
Eugene Spector, a US citizen born in Russia, has been sentenced to 15 years in a maximum security Russian penal colony.
Russia’s FSB security service has said a US citizen sentenced to a 15-year jail term this week was found guilty of leaking biotechnology secrets to the United States.
In a statement on Friday, FSB accused Eugene Spector, who was born in Russia and then moved to the US, of acting on behalf of the Pentagon.
“The American, acting in the interests of the Pentagon and a commercial organisation affiliated with it, collected and transferred to a foreign party various information on biotechnological and biomedical topics, including those constituting state secrets, for the subsequent creation by the US of a system of high-speed genetic screening of the Russian population,” the FSB said.
The details of the espionage case against Spector — who was already serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence in Russia for bribery — had been sparse.
Russian state news agencies reported on Tuesday that Spector had been handed a 13-year jail sentence for spying.
