The son of a senior Russian official, who was arrested in Italy at Washington’s request and placed under an electronic bracelet, fainted in the wild the day after Italian justice decided to hand him over to the United States, the Italian press reports on Friday .
Artyom Ouss, son of Siberian Krasnoyarsk Krai Governor Alexandre Ouss, is wanted by Washington over a case of illegal sale of American technology to defense contractors in Russia.
He was arrested at Milan’s Malpensa airport in October. He was under house arrest with an electronic bracelet pending a court decision on his extradition to the United States.
On Tuesday, the Italian judiciary gave the green light for his extradition and the next day Artiom Ouss disappeared.
According to La Repubblica newspaper, late Wednesday morning the Carabinieri checked on Mr Ouss, who was still at his home near Milan, but around noon the alarm on the electronic bracelet rang and the man had since been found there.
The newspaper mentions the possibility that he is already abroad, a theory also supported by the daily Corriere della Sera.
“Currently, the participation of the Moscow secret services in the escape assistance cannot be ruled out,” adds this newspaper.
Artiom Ouss is suspected of having bought, together with four other Russians and two Venezuelan oil brokers, electronic components for equipping airplanes, radar devices or missiles from the USA and having sold them to defense contractors, circumventing the applicable sanctions.
This network is suspected of using the same front company to transfer hundreds of millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil to Russia and China.
“As a father, I am very concerned about my son. I don’t know where he is and I don’t know exactly what happened. I can only say that according to Artyom, the apartment where he was staying was well guarded by the carabinieri. We even came to him several times in the evening. So I really don’t understand how he could have disappeared,” his father Alexandre Ouss told the press in Russia on Friday.
Commenting on the allegations against his son, Mr Ouss felt that “it was grossly fabricated” and that Artiom had found himself at the heart of a “geopolitical game”.