Russian suspect facing extradition from Italy to U.S. evades house arrest
MILAN (Reuters) – A Russian businessman facing extradition from Italy to the United States has escaped from house arrest, Italian police said on Thursday.
Artem Uss is due to face charges in the United States for shipping oil from Venezuela in breach of sanctions, and for bank fraud.
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The suspect has been on the run at least since Wednesday afternoon, when his electronic tag sent out an “evasion alarm”, the Carabinieri police said in a statement.
Officers checked in at his home in Basiglio, in the outskirts of Milan, only to find that he had gone, and are now actively looking for him, the Carabinieri added.
Uss’ Italian lawyer Vinicio Nardo had no comment.
An Italian court had agreed to transfer the Russian to the United States on Tuesday, but only on two of the four counts with which he was charged by U.S. authorities.
The court ruled against handing over the suspect for the additional alleged crimes of smuggling military technology from the United States to Russia and money laundering.
U.S. prosecutors last year charged Uss and four other Russian citizens with shipping military technologies bought from U.S. manufacturers to Russian buyers, some of which ended up on the battlefield in Ukraine.
They used a German company to ship the military technologies, as well as Venezuelan oil, to Russian purchasers, prosecutors said.
(Reporting by Emilio Parodi; writing by Alvise Armellini; editing by Jonathan Oatis)