KRASNOYARSK, November 13 (RIA Novosti) – A district court in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk paroled on Tuesday a Russian physicist who was imprisoned in 2004 for selling classified research data to China.
“The court has paroled Valentin Danilov for the duration of the remaining sentence – three years, two months and 11 days,” the court’s press secretary Maria Fomushina told RIA Novosti.
A criminal case against Daniliov was launched in 2000 on charges of espionage and embezzlement. Danilov’s research dealt with the effect of solar activity on space satellites.
The investigation found that Danilov passed the results of research conducted for the Russian Defense Ministry to officials of the All-China Import-Export Company Precision Engineering and the Lanzhou Institute of Physics in 1999.
He was kept in a pre-trial detention center from February 2001 until October 2002 but was cleared by a jury panel of all charges during a trial in December 2003.
The Supreme Court cancelled the jury verdict in June 2004 and sent his case for a retrial.
As a result, Danilov was sentenced in November 2004 to 14 years in maximum-security prison. The sentence was later reduced by one year.
The scientist consistently maintained that the information he was accused of selling had been available in scientific journals and had been declassified for over 10 years.
In 2011, the Krasnoyarsk court rejected Danilov’s appeal to be moved from a maximum-security prison to a general-population penal colony.