ROME (AP/AFP) : Italy arrested on Friday a suspect accused of helping a Russian governor’s son flee to his home nation while facing US extradition over alleged illegal export of military technology, authorities said.
The US Justice Department said some of the equipment had been “discovered on the battlefields of Ukraine.”
The suspect allegedly arranged for Artyom Uss to leave Italy in March 2023, the day after an Italian court ordered his extradition to the United States.
Artyom Uss, son of Siberian region governor Alexander Uss, was detained at Milan Malpensa airport on a US warrant in October 2022.
Washington accuses Uss of being involved in illegal schemes to export US military technology to Russia.
Despite wearing an electronic tracking bracelet, Uss went missing from his residence and several days later announced he was back in Russia.
The suspect arrested Friday, also a Russian, is suspected of having followed the decisions of the Milan court which ordered Uss’s extradition and preparing a plan for his escape.
The suspect, a Swiss resident, is also accused of “contacting the members of the gang who subsequently carried out the escape,” according to a statement from the Milan public prosecutor’s office.
Prosecutors said the 54-year-old, whose name they have not made public, was in constant contact with Uss’s family “in order to control the organization and execution of the exfiltration.”
Italian media identified the suspect as entrepreneur Dmitry Chirakadze, co-founder of the Pravo.ru group, which provides assistance to Russian court websites.
While not naming the suspect, the prosecutor’s office described the man as an aristocrat descended from a grand duke of Georgia.
He is also a shareholder in “numerous Russian companies with the involvement of members of the Uss family,” it added.
The five men who carried out the escape by car across the Balkans have all already been arrested.
