A Russian married couple living in the Stockholm area saw their home raided on Tuesday morning by the Swedish Security Police (Sapo) who arrested them on allegations of espionage over a period of ten years.
The couple, said to be in their 60s, were arrested Tuesday morning at around 6 am as part of “Operation Spear” after Sapo officers and members of the National Task Force, a tactical unit in the National Operations Department of the Swedish Police Authority, raided the home of the couple in the Stockholm area.
The pair are said to have immigrated from Russia to Sweden in the early 2000s and are suspected of engaging in spying activities around 2013, the newspaper Expressen reports.
“We carried out an operation in the Stockholm area on Tuesday and arrested two people. One of them is suspected of grossly unlawful intelligence activities against Sweden and against foreign powers. The other is suspected of aiding and abetting,” Gabriel Wernstedt, press secretary at the Swedish Security Police, said.
It remains unclear which country the couple were spying on behalf of, as Wernstedt refused to answer further questions on the issue.
Swedish Spy Scandal: Iranian Brothers Charged with Spying for Russia https://t.co/4Ig8kzTanE
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 12, 2022
Fredrik Hultgren-Friberg, press secretary at Sapo, told broadcaster SVT that the couple had been under investigation for a long time prior to the arrests and stated, “In connection with the operation, searches have also been carried out, seizures have been made and interrogations have been carried out.”
The arrests come as two other suspects, a pair of brothers born in Iran, also face trial in Sweden for alleged spying activity over the course of around ten years from September of 2011 to September 2021.
The older brother in the case is said to have worked for Sapo along with the Swedish armed forces and the highly secretive Office for Special Acquisition (KDI) and is accused of passing information to the Russian military intelligence agency GRU, with his brother accused of acting as a contact and receiving cash payments.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.