One of Russia’s leading scientists has died less than two days after he was yanked out of a cancer bed and locked up on charges of high treason.
Dr Dmitry Kolker, 54, was flown across Russia from Novosibirsk, where he taught quantum physics and maths, to Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison on Friday.
After 48 hours, the leading laser scientist died, his family reported.
He was under the watch of the state security service FSB, once overseen by Vladimir Putin.
Dr Kolker’s family accused the FSB of torture and abusing the doctor’s human rights by dragging him out of his death bed. He had stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
The FSB argued it had medical clearance to unplug him from his hospital drip and lock him up as part of a major spy investigation.
The scientist was accused of leading a pro-China spy ring alongside Professor Anatoly Maslov, 75, a hypersonic technologies teacher.
Professor Anatoly Maslow remains in Lefortovo, which became well-known during Stalin’s Great Purge of political opponents, businessmen and scientists.
An academic who knew Kolker said that Vladimir Putin is seeing spies everywhere, and that leading scientists were officially encouraged to cooperate with top foreign partners and did so, and now they’re being accused of spying.
Dr Kolker was head of Novosibirsk State University quantum optical technologies laboratory, and he was considered a world expert on lasers, having previously collaborated with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford.
Dr Kolker was too sick for chemotherapy when he was detained.
His daughter Alina Mironova, 29, said after his detention in late June that her family was going through absolute torture, and that their father couldn’t pass away surrounded by his family members.
The scientist’s son Maxim, 22, said his father had travelled to China on a lecturing trip, but the scientist, also a talented musician, was accompanied all the time by an FSB agent who approved every word of his lectures, he said.
They vehemently denied he’d passed state secrets on lasers to China.
Dr Maslov, the chief researcher at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was accused of transmitting hypersonic state secrets to a foreign power, believed to be China.
The exact nature of the alleged crime isn’t known but his work included hypersonic innovations for aircraft.
Maslow is known to have formerly worked with Boeing in America and with German and Chinese partners.
If this is how paranoid Vladimir Putin treats the Russian people, it’s no surprise he doesn’t have any respect for the remainder of the world.
Vladimir Putin is an egomaniacal man who doesn’t seem to be very well in the head, especially if he can kill innocent children, let alone his own people, and this man is obviously going around the track the wrong way.
Vladimir Putin has completely lost the plot, and I’m sure he would be quite happy to massacre the majority of us throughout the world.
Vladimir Putin, he’s behind you! Boo! And to think that this madman is in command of nuclear weapons.
This is beyond words, yanking a cancer-riddled man from his death bed to hasten his already certain impending death, by torture, and how another human being could do such a thing is beyond me. Vladimir Putin actually isn’t deserving of breathing the air that we all share and he’s worse than an animal. What, does Vladimir Putin get an erection while killing people? Or was this a tactic to show his supporters that they’d daren’t think about overthrowing him because he’s killed a cancer patient and they could be next?
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 