2023-11-09 21:49:00
Eight years in prison for having floundered among the Russian secret services. Thursday, November 9, a court in Riga (Latvia) convicted a former Latvian Interior Minister, Janis Adamsons, and her accomplice Gennady Silonov. They received, respectively, eight and a half and seven and a half years in prison for spying for the Russian secret services.
“Adamsons collected secret and unclassified information on behalf of the Russian secret service (FSB) in an illegal, systematic and targeted manner,” Judge Erlens Ernstsons said after delivering his decision.
READ ALSO Russian spies: all roads lead to RomeAfter serving as Interior Minister in 1994 and 1995, Janis Adamsons, now 67, remained an MP for six parliamentary terms, until 2021, the year he was arrested. He had served in the Soviet Navy from 1979 to 1992 as a political officer. After returning to Latvia, he was enlisted in the Latvian navy, recreated from scratch after 50 years of Soviet occupation, before becoming deputy head of the navy and acting head of a border guard brigade.
A commitment out of conviction?
Russian citizen Gennady Silonov, a former KGB officer in the 1980s, collected the information transmitted by Janis Adamsons during around forty meetings over four years, according to the Pietiek.com information site. Silonov was a career KGB officer until 1991, when Moscow’s secret service was outlawed by Latvia.
READ ALSO Leboncoin, a recruitment gateway for Russian espionage“Adamsons was not interested in working with Russian intelligence for money. More likely, it was out of ideological convictions,” the prosecutor told the LTV television channel. The two defendants pleaded not guilty and intend to appeal the verdict, while the prosecution declared itself satisfied with the sentence.
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