KAPO official arrested, suspected of treason
23.02.2012, 09:45A senior national security official, Aleksei Dressen, along with his wife Viktoria, were detained Wednesday morning at Tallinn Airport, and are under investigation for selling classified information to the Russian Federation's intelligence service, the FSB.
The couple was detained as Dressen's wife prepared to depart on a flight to Moscow.
According to the prosecutors, Dressen was in possession of a storage device containing classified documents when he was arrested. The official's wife whose parents, according to media, lived in Moscow, is suspected of acting as a courier.
In earlier years, when he was still head of the corruption department of the security police, he had also been in Moscow.
Later, when he started to work with issues of counterintelligence and extremists, he was banned from travelling to Russia, as all Estonian security police officials.
According to the charges, Dressen, 43, sold information to the FSB in return for monetary rewards. It is not clear how much he earned from his activities.
Dressen who speaks fluent Estonians has been working in KAPO, Estonia's national security agency, since 1993 and was one of its most experienced staff members.
The suspicion was unveiled at a joint press conference given by KAPO and the Prosecutor's Office on Wednesday.