Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) said Thursday that a reporter for the Wall Street Journal has been arrested on espionage charges.
The FSB said that Evan Gershkovich was detained in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg while allegedly trying to obtain classified information.
Gershkovich is the first reporter for an American news outlet to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War.
The FSB said it had “stopped the illegal activities of US citizen Gershkovich Evan, born in 1991, a correspondent of the Moscow bureau of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, accredited at the Russian foreign ministry, who is suspected of spying in the interests of the American government”.
The security service said that Gershkovich “was acting on the US orders to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military industrial complex that constitutes a state secret.” Last Saturday, the US Justice Department announced charges against Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov who was said to be an agent of a Russian intelligence service and operated under the alias Victor Muller Ferreira. (QNA)
Source: Qatar News Agency