A powerful electromagnetic emission from a U.S. radar in the Pacific could have caused the malfunctioning of the Russian Phobos-Grunt probe, the Kommersant daily said on Tuesday.

A Russian government investigation commission is considering several causes of the failure, including a short circuit or “external impact,” the paper said citing an unnamed source in the Russian space industry.

“Experts do not dismiss the possibility that the probe could have accidentally come under the impact of emissions [from a U.S. radar stationed on the Marshall Islands], whose megawatt impulse triggered the malfunctioning of on-board electronics,” the source said.

The source did not specify the type of the radar, but said it was monitoring the trajectory of an asteroid at the time of the Phobos-Grunt launch.

The source stressed that it was more likely an accident rather than a determined act of sabotage.

The government commission officials have refused to comment on the claim, Kommersant said.

The commission is expected to inform the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos Vladimir Popovkin of the preliminary results of the investigation on January 20.

Popovkin earlier suggested that the inexplicable malfunction of the Russian spacecraft could have been caused by “interference from a foreign technical facility.”

The official results of the investigation will be made public on January 26, Kommersant said.

Phobos-Grunt, launched on November 9, was designed to bring back rock and soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos. However, it got stuck in a so-called support orbit after its engines had failed to put it on course for the Red Planet, and fell back on Earth late on Sunday.

According to NASA, Russia has failed in all 17 of its attempts to study the Red Planet close-up since 1960. The most recent failure before November accident occurred in 1996, when Russia lost its Mars-96 orbiter during launch.

Russia is starting the extradition from Poland of a former Moscow Region Deputy Prosecutor over his involvement in a multi-million dollar undercover gambling scam, investigators told RAPSI news agency on Monday.

“The extradition documents have been translated into Polish, the language of the country where the suspect was detained…The documents have been delivered to the Prosecutor General’s Office,” Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said.

The wanted man, former Deputy Prosecutor Alexander Ignatenko, was placed on the international wanted list after police undercovered a massive gambling operation in spring 2011.

A businessman, Ivan Nazarov allegedly operated illegal casinos in 15 towns in Moscow Region.

According to law enforcement authorities, high-ranking officials in the Russian Prosecutor’s Office and the Interior Ministry were involved in the casino operations, which generated $5 to $10 million in revenue monthly.

Gambling has been illegal in Russia except four designated zones since 2009, but flourishes in a huge undercover business.

Poland’s Internal Security Agency detained Ignatenko at the popular Polish ski resort of Zakopane on January 1 and he was placed in custody three days later.

Warsaw is expecting a request for the suspect’s extradition from Poland, Polish Prosecutor General’s Office Press Secretary Mateus Martenuk told RIA Novosti. As soon as the court receives the materials, he said, it will examine whether it is possible to hand Ignatenko over to Russia.

The Polish Justice Minister will make a final decision on the extradition.

A U.S. investment fund has agreed to buy a shopping mall in downtown St. Petersburg for $1.1 billion, in Russia’s largest ever real estate deal.

Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund VII will purchase the Galereya (Gallery) center from Meridian Capital, run by a group of Kazakh investors, sources close to the transaction told Vedomosti business daily.

The purchase of the mall, St. Petersburg’s largest, is expected to be completed later this month.

If completed, the transaction will be the largest on Russia’s real estate market, business analyst Sayan Tsyrenov told Vedomosti.

Galereya opened in November 2010 and features 290 stores, a 10-screen movie theater, and a 27-lane bowling alley.

Morgan Stanley and Meridian Capital were not available for comment.

A Russian government commission inquiring into why the Phobos-Grunt Mars probe crashed this week is to test whether it was affected after launch by U.S. radars on its second orbit around the Earth, the commission said on Tuesday.

The investigators said that they would stage an experiment where a model Phobos will be subjected to radiation similar to that from U.S. radars.

“The results of the experiment will allow us to prove or dismiss the possibility of the radars’ impact,” said Commission head Yury Koptev, the former head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin also said on Tuesday that the loss of the probe could have been caused by the U.S. radar’s activity.

The current Roscosmos head, Vladimir Popovkin previously said that that the inexplicable malfunction of the Russian spacecraft could have been caused by “interference from a foreign technical facility.”

“Experts do not dismiss the possibility that the probe could have accidentally come under the impact of emissions [from a U.S. radar stationed on the Marshall Islands], whose megawatt impulse triggered the malfunctioning of on-board electronics,” Russian business daily, Kommersant, said on Tuesday, citing an unnamed source in the country’s space industry as saying.

The source did not specify the type of radar, but said it was monitoring the trajectory of an asteroid at the time of the Phobos-Grunt launch.

It was more likely an accident rather than a determined act of sabotage, the source told the Kommersant.

The investigators are considering several causes of the failure, including a short circuit or “external impact.” They are expected to inform the Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin of the preliminary results of the investigation on January 20. The official results will be made public on January 26, Kommersant said.

Phobos-Grunt, launched on November 9, was designed to bring back rock and soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos. However, it got stuck in a so-called support orbit after its engines had failed to put it on course for the Red Planet, and fell back on Earth late on Sunday.

According to NASA, Russia has failed in all 17 of its attempts to study the Red Planet close-up since 1960. The most recent failure before November accident occurred in 1996, when Russia lost its Mars-96 orbiter during launch.

Relatives of Russia’s Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice hockey team, which was almost wiped out in an air crash in September 2011, are to demand a new probe into the tragedy, the Izvestiya daily reported on Wednesday.

The team’s Yak-42 crashed just after takeoff on September 7, 2011, as the team was heading to Minsk for their season opener against Dinamo Minsk. Forty-four people were killed including a slew of former NHL stars. Only a flight engineer survived.

In their letter, the families of those killed in the crash said the conclusion by Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) experts blaming the pilots is biased and demanded that new experts from the Defense Ministry take part in a new investigation.

A MAK report in early November 2011 said the plane crashed due to poor coordination between the crew and lack of training. It also said a sedative drug was found in the blood of one of the pilots.