Guam: Russia Claims detaining of Russian citizen “de facto kidnapping”

themoscowtimes.com reported Moscow has dispatched a diplomatic mission to the U.S. territory of Guam to demand that a Russian lawmaker’s son arrested on hacking charges be transferred from jail to a hospital, diplomats said.

Suspected hacker Roman Seleznev, who has a metal plate in his head after surviving a bomb attack in Morocco in 2011, needs “constant medical observation after switching from a Russian medical drug to an American one that has a serious side effect,” Sergei Chumaryov, a diplomat at the Russian Embassy in Washington, told Itar-Tass on Monday.

Seleznev, the 30-year-old son of a State Duma lawmaker from the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, was detained earlier this month in the Maldives by the U.S. Secret Service on suspicion of being a member of a cyber gang that hacked and sold credit-card data between 2009-2011, causing more than $1 million in damages.

The arrest of Seleznev and his transfer to Guam has prompted outcry from Moscow officials, with the Foreign Ministry describing the arrest as a “de facto kidnapping of a Russian citizen” and “another unfriendly move by Washington” in a statement earlier this month. Read Article