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Suspected of espionage: Russian scientist in court
The espionage trial against a 30-year-old Russian began at the Munich Higher Regional Court on Thursday. As a research associate at the Institute for Materials Research at the University of Augsburg, he is said to have supplied sensitive information on the European Ariane missile program to the Russian foreign intelligence service SWR. The Attorney General accuses the man of “secret service agent activity”. From the end of November 2019, there were personal meetings between the accused and the senior officer of the Russian foreign intelligence service stationed in Germany. The accused passed on information on research projects in the field of aerospace technology. Court spokesman Florian Gliwitzky: “The prosecution assumes that there were regular payments, always in the range of 100, 200, up to a maximum of 600 euros, and that total amounts in the range of around 2500 euros were paid. The Senate will now have to clarify in the next twelve days of the hearing whether this allegation is true. A comprehensive hearing of evidence has been scheduled. The federal prosecutor’s office has named more than 30 witnesses. Of course, there are also a number of documents to be looked at.” The accused denies the allegations: he did not know that his contact man was passing the information on to the Russian secret service. According to the defense, the vast majority of the information in question can also be accessed in publicly accessible databases on the Internet.
A researcher at the University of Augsburg is said to have spied for the Russian foreign intelligence service.