Moscow jails US Citizen who sent Russian DNA to the Pentagon

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US national Eugene ‘Gene’ Spector, who was found guilty of espionage earlier this week, had been collecting “biomedical” data in the country, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has said. The authorities believe these materials could have been used by the US government to develop a biological weapons targeting the Russian population.

Over the past several years, there have been a number of high-profile cases in which Russian security services have accused American citizens of espionage. Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, Moscow and Western nations have also increasingly expelled each other’s diplomats, claiming they are spies.

In a press release on Friday, the FSB alleged that the “American national, acting in the interest of the Pentagon and a commercial organization affiliated with it, gathered and handed over to a foreign party various biotechnological and biomedical data, including classified materials, with the aim of creating a high-speed genetic screening system of Russia’s population by the US.”

On Monday, a court in Moscow sentenced Spector to 15 years in prison as well as a 14 million-ruble ($135,000) fine.

The former chair of the board of Russia’s Medpolymerprom Group, a supplier of disposable medical items, was handed the punishment in conjunction with his previous sentencing for acting as an intermediary in a bribery case. In 2022, the US citizen of Russian origin was sentenced to 3.5 years behind bars after being found guilty of providing an aide to former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich with free trip vouchers from 2015 to 2016. The judge ruled at the time that Spector had thus remunerated the woman for promoting the products of several pharmacy companies.

Last August, a court separately ordered his arrest on suspicion of espionage, though the details of the case were not made public.