(Rome) The son of a senior Russian official, arrested in Italy at the request of Washington and placed under an electronic bracelet, fainted in the wild the day after the decision of the Italian justice to hand him over to the United States, reported the Italian press on Friday.
Artyom Ouss, son of the governor of the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk Alexandre Ouss, is wanted by Washington for a case of illegal sale of American technologies to arms companies in Russia.
He was arrested in October at Malpensa airport in Milan. Pending a court decision on his extradition to the United States, he was under house arrest, with an electronic bracelet.
On Tuesday, Italian justice gave the green light to his extradition and the next day Artiom Ouss disappeared.
According to the daily La Repubblica, at the end of Wednesday morning, the carabinieri checked Mr. Ouss who was still at his home in the vicinity of Milan, but around lunchtime the alarm of the electronic bracelet rang and the man has since been found.
The newspaper mentions the possibility that he is already abroad, a theory also supported by the daily Corriere della Sera.
“At present, an involvement of the Moscow Secret Service in aiding this escape is not excluded,” the newspaper added.
Artiom Ouss is suspected, along with four other Russians and two Venezuelan oil brokers, of having bought electronic components from the United States intended to equip planes, radars or missiles, and of having resold them to arms companies Russians by circumventing the sanctions in force.
This network is suspected of having used the same front company to transfer hundreds of millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil to Russia and China.
“As a father, I am very worried about my son. I don’t know where he is and I don’t know what happened in detail. All I can say is that according to Artyom, the apartment where he was staying was well guarded by the carabinieri. We even came to see him several times a night. So I really can’t understand how he could have disappeared,” his father Alexandre Ouss reacted to the press in Russia on Friday.
Commenting on the accusations against his son, Mr. Ouss considered that “it is grossly fabricated” and that Artiom had found himself at the heart of a “geopolitical game”.
