BERLIN (Reuters) – A German court on Wednesday sentenced a Russian researcher to a one-year suspended jail sentence for spying on Europe’s Ariane space launcher challenge.
The man, recognized by the court solely as Ilnur N., handed over info on analysis initiatives, together with the Ariane Next launcher, to a handler from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) on a number of events between 2019 and 2021, in keeping with the court verdict.
The trial casts a highlight on Russian intelligence exercise within the West, which has launched sweeping sanctions towards Russia over what Moscow calls a “particular army operation” in Ukraine, launched on Feb. 24.
N. had labored as a analysis affiliate on the University of Augsburg, a centre for aerospace analysis, when the SVR handler approached him. Augsburg can be house to giant components of the manufacturing for the next-generation Ariane 6 launch car.
Jointly owned by Airbus and France’s Safran, ArianeGroup is likely one of the best-established gamers within the fast-growing world launch market, the place competitors between gamers like Russia’s Roskosmos and personal sector upstarts like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is fierce.
But the Munich court stated that the SVR handler pretended that he labored for a Russian financial institution and wanted info for non-public investments. N. didn’t know for certain that he was working for Russian intelligence, although he had his suspicions, it stated.
Another motive for the comparatively lenient sentence, which can imply two years of probation for N., is that he cooperated with the prosecution and that he solely gave the handler info from typically accessible sources fairly than from confidential paperwork.
In addition to the suspended sentence, 500 euros price of property are to be confiscated from N., which is how a lot the court believes he acquired from the handler as cost in April 2021.
Germany is a frequent goal of Russian intelligence operations, Germany’s counter-espionage company has stated.
In December, a German court discovered that Russian brokers had been behind the 2019 homicide, in broad daylight in a central Berlin park, of a Chechen dissident, an act the choose labelled “state terrorism”.
Russia dismissed the state terrorism and homicide verdict as “not goal and politically motivated”.
(Reporting by Maria Sheahan; Editing by Mike Harrison)
