October 2004 Archives
MosNews, Created: 26.10.2004 15:39 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 16:48 MSK
A member of the jury that convicted arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin of espionage last spring worked for Russia’s spy agency, Sutyagin’s lawyer has said.
Speaking to Ekho Moskvy radio Tuesday, lawyer Anna Stavitskaya said that “one of the trial jurors who convicted Sutyagin turned out to be a former staff member of the Russian security services” that originally filed a suit against Sutyagin, implying that the jury was biased.
Igor Sutyagin, a scholar at Moscow’s USA and Canada Institute, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in April after a Russian court convicted him of selling information on nuclear submarines and missile-warning systems to a British company that Russian investigators said was a CIA cover.
The lawyers have already notified the European Human Rights Court about their findings and they intend to file an official appeal later, she added.
Stavitskaya’s statement confirmed a report in The Moscow News on Friday that juror Grigory Yakimishen had served as an intelligence agent in Poland in the 1990s and was involved in a spy scandal there.
Speaking to Moscow News journalists, Yakimishen neither denied nor confirmed his work in Poland. During the court hearings Yakimishin did not confess the fact he used to work for the Russian security services. At present Yakimishin is working for the Farma pharmaceutical company.
“The defense possesses documents that testify to the fact that this man was a representative of the KGB. We have documents proving what journalists have also discovered,” the Associated Press quoted Stavitskaya as saying. She didn’t elaborate.
Sutyagin, who has been jailed since 1999 and maintains the information he gathered was from public sources, is among several Russian scholars and journalists the FSB has prosecuted for alleged espionage.
The crackdown on alleged spies has been blamed on the increasing numbers of siloviki — members of the military and the security services — in the government under President Vladimir Putin.
The Moscow Times, October 26th, 2004
By Anatoly Medetsky, Staff Writer
One of the jurors who found arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin guilty of espionage concealed that he was a veteran of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and that provides a reason to appeal the verdict, defense lawyers said Monday.
Grigory Yakimishen failed to reveal during jury selection that he was an undercover foreign intelligence officer in Poland in the 1990s, said defense lawyers Anna Stavitskaya and Boris Kuznetsov.
The Supreme Court in August upheld the decision of the Moscow City Court to sentence Sutyagin, a researcher at the USA and Canada Institute, to 15 years in prison for selling information on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British company that the Federal Security Service claimed was a CIA cover.
Sutyagin, who is serving his time in a maximum-security prison in Udmurtia, maintained that he took his information from publicly available sources, and that he had no reason to believe the British company was linked to U.S. intelligence.
Human rights advocates called the sentence, the longest in Russia for spying since Soviet times, part of an FSB campaign to intimidate academics.
Yakimishen's name first surfaced as a part of the defense lawyers' appeal to the Supreme Court. The appeal said that Yakimishen came from the pool of jurors compiled for the Moscow District Military Court and therefore he should have been barred from participating in Sutyagin's trial. The lawyers are now preparing the last possible appeal, to the presidium of the Supreme Court, with the new information about Yakimishen, Kuznetsov said.
Yakimishen's intelligence background came to light in a Polish book titled, "Alganov, Yakimishen and Others. Behind the Scenes of Russian Intelligence," which is being translated into Russian, Kuznetsov said.
The defense will also add the complaint about Yakimishen to the case it submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, he said.
Yakimishen could not immediately be reached for comment, but Moskovskiye Novosti reported Monday that he had refused to talk to the press.
