WORLD / Europe

Retired Russian colonel sentenced for spying
(AP)
Updated: 2006-08-09 17:27

MOSCOW - A retired Russian secret service colonel was sentenced Wednesday by a military court in Moscow to 13 years imprisonment for spying, news agencies reported.

Sergei Skripal was found guilty of passing along state secrets, the reports said. The newspaper Izvestia reported Wednesday that Skripal was charged with spying for Britain's MI6 foreign intelligence agency.

The 55-year-old was accused of working over a period of several years for MI6, in particular revealing the names of several dozen Russian agents working in various European countries, Izvestia reported.

The daily, which did not name its sources, said that Skripal's activities had seriously disrupted Russian espionage activities in Europe.

Russian investigators believe Skripal received around US$100,000 (euro78,000) from MI6, for whom he started working during a lengthy foreign posting in the latter half of the 1990s, the newspaper reported.

Russia's chief military prosecutor expressed satisfaction at the trial's outcome. "The conviction of Skripal is lawful and justified," Sergei Fridinsky was quoted as saying by the RIA-Novosti news agency.

The prosecution and trial of the colonel had not been made public until Wednesday. He was detained in December 2004, according to Izvestia.

Earlier this year Britain was caught up in a spying scandal in Russia.

The Federal Security Service, or FSB, accused four British diplomats of espionage and said one of them had provided money for nongovernment organizations _ accusations dismissed by Kremlin critics as part of a campaign to discredit NGOs.

The FSB, the main successor agency to the KGB, also said that a Russian citizen who allegedly had contacts with British agents had been detained and confessed to espionage.

Since the election in 2000 of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel and one-time head of the FSB, prosecutions for espionage have markedly increased in Russia.

In 2004, arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin was convicted of treason for allegedly selling information on nuclear submarines and missile-warning systems to a British company that investigators claimed was a CIA cover.

A physicist, Valentin Danilov, was also convicted that year of selling classified information on space technology to China.