A Swedish court sentences a former Swedish intelligence officer to life imprisonment. The judge said that he “abused the trust placed in him”. His younger brother was sentenced to 10 years in prison. “The country that poses the greatest threat to Sweden”
A Stockholm court has sentenced a former Swedish intelligence officer to life in prison and his younger brother to 10 years in prison after finding them both guilty of spying for Russia’s military intelligence service for more than a decade.
Fayman Kia, 42, served in the Swedish security and counterintelligence service, Säpo, and in the armed forces’ intelligence agencies, including the foreign intelligence agency Must and KSI, a top-secret unit dealing with Swedish spies abroad.
He was found guilty of aggravated espionage and unauthorized handling of classified documents. The judge, Mons Wijn, said Kia had abused the trust placed in him to help Russia, “the country that poses the greatest threat to Sweden.”
His brother Piam, 35, was convicted of espionage under aggravated circumstances for planning the crime and conducting contacts with Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, while passing on 45 of the 90 documents Peyman collected from the intelligence, the court ruled that they “jointly and coordinated, without authorization and to assist Russia and the GRU, Acquired, transferred and shared information whose disclosure to a foreign power could harm Sweden’s security.”
The Iranian-born brothers, who both hold Swedish citizenship, have denied the charges and are expected to appeal against them. They were arrested in 2021 when suspicion was discovered about them, they were accused of spying for Russia since 2011.
Much of the evidence, the court hearing and the full decision were not released to the public for reasons of national security, and the court admitted that despite evidence including USB drives, laptops and mobile phones, “pieces of the puzzle are missing.”