A renowned Russian scientist with terminal cancer has died two days after being arrested and pulled from his hospital bed on espionage charges, his family said on Sunday.
Dmitry Kolker, 54, died at dawn on Saturday in a Moscow hospital where he had been transferred from a prison in the capital, indicates a message from the authorities published by his son, Maxime Kolker, on the social network VKontakte.
Two days earlier, a court in Novosibirsk, a large city in Siberia, had indicated that Dmitri Kolker had been arrested and remanded in custody for two months.
According to this source, he was charged with “state treason and ‘espionage’ for the benefit of a ‘foreign state’, a crime punishable by 20 years in prison.
His family says he was arrested by security service (FSB) agents at a clinic in Novosibirsk where he was being treated for terminal cancer, then transferred to Moscow, despite his state of health.
“The FSB killed my father, they knew what he was in, but they took him out of the hospital. Thank you my country!!! His family didn’t even have permission to say goodbye to him,” Maxime Kolker wrote on VKontakte on Sunday.
Specialist in lasers, Dmitri Kolker, doctor in physics and mathematics, directed a laboratory on “quantum and optical technologies”, according to the site of the State University of Novosibirsk.
According to his son, he was suspected of espionage after giving lessons at an international conference in China. During this conference, still according to his son, Dmitri Kolker was permanently accompanied by an FSB agent to avoid any dissemination of sensitive information.
In Russia, scientists are regularly accused of espionage and convicted in sometimes very controversial cases.