Moscow

A senior Russian material scientist has been accused of selling state secrets to South Korea, in the latest of a string of arrests by the country's security services.

Oskar Kaibyshev, founder and director of the Institute for Metals Superplasticity Problems in Ufa, could be imprisoned for ten years if he is convicted. He says he is being accused of exporting dual-use technologies, which have both civilian and military applications, to a tyre manufacturer.

The 66-year-old researcher reported his own arrest on 18 February, telling news organizations that he had been questioned for some six hours on the previous day by agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB). He says that he has been suspended from his post at the institute, his bank accounts have been frozen, and he has been prohibited from leaving Ufa, which lies 1,500 km southeast of Moscow.

The interrogation focused on several years of collaboration between the institute and the tyre maker ASA, a subsidiary of Hankook Tire, which is based in Seoul. Kaibyshev says that the firm is using superplastic technology in its designs for high-pressure tyres. The technology stretches titanium alloy to enhance its mechanical properties and, according to Kaibyshev, can be used to produce spherical tanks that can be inflated to a pressure of 1,000 atmospheres.

The institute has not had access to state secrets for two decades, Kaibyshev told the Moscow-based radio station, Ekho Moskvy. “If you need to put somebody on trial, it should be agents of the FSB, who were fully informed of our contracts and should have warned us if there were any problems.”

Ernst Chyorny, a member of the Public Committee for the Protection of Scientists — a Moscow-based human-rights group — says that the technologies in question had already been exported to India in 1987, and to Italy in 1990. They are also described in a forthcoming book co-authored by Kaibyshev. The book is being funded by the International Science and Technology Center, a Moscow-based project supported by, among others, the United States and the European Union. The centre helps military scientists from the former Soviet Union to find civilian work.

The FSB declined to comment, saying that it would release details of the charges against Kaibyshev next week.