Arrested American ‘in Russia for wedding’
Paul Whelan, a former US Marine arrested in Russia on espionage charges, was visiting Moscow over the holidays to attend a wedding when he suddenly disappeared, his brother said yesterday.
Whelan, 48, who is head of global security for a Michigan-based auto parts supplier, was arrested on Friday. In announcing the arrest three days later, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said he was caught “during an espionage operation”, but gave no details.
“We are deeply concerned for his safety and wellbeing,” his family said in a statement that his brother David Whelan posted on Twitter. “His innocence is undoubted and we trust that his rights will be respected.”
The Russian spying charges carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
David Whelan said in an interview that his brother had been to Russia several times previously, so when a fellow former Marine was planning a wedding in Moscow with a Russian woman he was asked to come along to help out.
The morning of his arrest, he had taken a group of wedding guests on a tour of the Kremlin museums. The last time anyone heard from him was at about 5pm local time and then he failed to show up that evening for the wedding, his brother said.
“It was extraordinarily out of character,” he said.
Reuters reported that Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA Moscow station chief, said it was “possible, even likely” that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Whelan’s arrest to set up an exchange for Maria Butina, a Russian citizen who pleaded guilty on December 13 to acting as an agent tasked with influencing US conservative groups.
Putin’s aim was “to make us feel some pain and his family to feel some pain. That’s their [Moscow’s] pressure point,” Hoffman told Reuters. “Putin knows there will be a lot of public square pressure to get this guy out,” he said.
The family feared he had been mugged or was in a car accident, David Whelan said, and it was when searching the internet on Monday that he learned of the arrest. “I was looking for any stories about dead Americans in Moscow, so in a way it was better than finding out that he had died,” he said.