NYT WORLD: They Sneaked Into a Derelict Arms Plant: Instagrammers or Spies?
By Andrew Higgins
Section: World
Source: New York Times
Published Date: March 3, 2023 at 02:00AM
They arrived at the derelict Albanian weapons factory in a bright orange Chevrolet Camaro in broad daylight. After they clambered over a back wall in full view of nearby houses, one of them was spotted by military guards and asked what he was doing.
The man — a 24-year-old Russian, Mikhail Zorin, who had arrived in Albania by bicycle two weeks earlier, purportedly to take artsy photographs of abandoned buildings — pulled out a canister of self-defense spray and squirted two guards.
Captured nonetheless, he was taken to a police station for questioning and declared himself a Russian agent, either out of honesty or a dishonest urge to tell interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear.
“If he is a spy, he is a very stupid one,” Mr. Zorin’s lawyer, Isuf Shehu, said in an interview in Tirana, the Albanian capital, scoffing at an espionage investigation into the trio as a “theater of the absurd, like Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’”
By Andrew Higgins
Section: World
Source: New York Times
Published Date: March 3, 2023 at 02:00AM
Three people, including two Russians, arrested on charges of entering an abandoned rifle factory have puzzled Albanian authorities at a time when suspicions about Moscow have been mounting.
The three espionage suspects — two Russians and one Ukrainian — were hardly discreet.They arrived at the derelict Albanian weapons factory in a bright orange Chevrolet Camaro in broad daylight. After they clambered over a back wall in full view of nearby houses, one of them was spotted by military guards and asked what he was doing.
The man — a 24-year-old Russian, Mikhail Zorin, who had arrived in Albania by bicycle two weeks earlier, purportedly to take artsy photographs of abandoned buildings — pulled out a canister of self-defense spray and squirted two guards.
Captured nonetheless, he was taken to a police station for questioning and declared himself a Russian agent, either out of honesty or a dishonest urge to tell interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear.
“If he is a spy, he is a very stupid one,” Mr. Zorin’s lawyer, Isuf Shehu, said in an interview in Tirana, the Albanian capital, scoffing at an espionage investigation into the trio as a “theater of the absurd, like Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’”
Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/03/world/europe/albania-russia-ukraine.html
Posts
