Jury Member in Sutyagin Spy Case Served in Secret Services — Lawyers
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.
