Russian security service says jailed American leaked biotech secrets | Prison news

Eugene Spector, a Russian-born US citizen, spent 15 years in a maximum-security penal colony in Russia.

Russia’s FSB security service said this week that a US citizen who was sentenced to 15 years in prison was found guilty of passing biotechnology secrets to the US.

In a statement on Friday, the FSB accused Eugene Spector, who was born in Russia and later moved to the United States, of acting on behalf of the Pentagon.

“In the interest of the American Pentagon and a commercial organization associated with it, the United States has collected and transferred to a foreign country various information on biotechnological and biomedical topics, including state secrets, for the subsequent creation of a system by the United States. Conducting high-speed genetic screening of the Russian population,” the FSB said.

Details of the espionage case against Spector, who is already serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for bribery in Russia, were scarce.

On Tuesday, Russian state news agencies reported that Spector had been sentenced to 13 years in prison on espionage charges.

It was added to the existing bribery sentence and became a new sentence of 15 years in a maximum security institution.

The FSB, which usually says whether a defendant confesses, did not say how Spector pleaded during the closed court hearing.

The US State Department said it is aware of the news of the sentencing of a US citizen in Russia this week and is monitoring the situation.

The detention of US citizens in Russia has become a major point of contention between Washington and Moscow as relations between the two countries have been strained over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

More than twenty people were released in August prisoner exchange agreement citizens of a number of countries participated.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan – two American citizens imprisoned in Russia – were among those released.