MOSCOW. Nov 25 (Interfax) - Russian scientist Igor Sutyagin convicted of espionage and deported to the United States claims he was treated with psychotropic substances before being questioned at the Lefortovo detention ward.
Sutyagin made the allegation in an article posted on the Human Rights in Russia website.
He said security service agents fed him with "borsch and a glass of cognac", which contained a psychotropic substance.
That interrogation started much earlier than usual, at 7 p.m., Sutyagin said.
"A large bowl of borsch was put on the table between a lieutenant colonel and myself, and it reeked a strong tempting smell. A single glass of cognac was placed on the lieutenant colonel's side of the table. Much later, that modest meal was explained by a specialist," he said.
Sutyagin said his memory started to fail him soon after the interrogation. "I had inexplicable failures of short-term memory. I put something down, looked away and then asked my cellmate if he had seen the item I had just put down. The problem continues till now," he said.
He said that security service agents made a film, which proved his cooperation with foreign secret services, after that interrogation.
"The interrogation resulted in a rather strange film, which, as I was told, was actively shown on television to assure the public that Sutyagin was an agent of the enemy. In fact, the film was supposed to prove the Federal Security Service's idea of my high treason," Sutyagin said.
Interfax has not obtained comment from law enforcers and the Federal Service on Prisons and Penitentiaries.
The Moscow City Court sentenced Sutyagin, former head of the military-technical and military-economic policy sector of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies, to 15 years in a maximum security penitentiary on April 7, 2004. The court found him guilty of espionage, and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence. The jurors unanimously pronounced him guilty of passing secret information to U.S. military intelligence officers acting under the disguise of the British consulting company Alternative Futures in 1998-1999.
President Dmitry Medvedev pardoned 20 people, among them Sutyagin, Alexander Zaporozhsky, Sergei Skripal and Gennady Vasilenko, in early July. The four men were swapped for ten Russians seized in the United States on espionage charges.
Sutyagin and former reserve colonel of the Main Intelligence Department Sergei Skripal were moved to the UK after they had been pardoned by the Russian president and swapped for suspected spies.
Sutyagin and Skripal were brought from Moscow to Vienna by plane on July 9. A plane belonging to U.S. carrier Vision Airlines took them aboard. The jet made a stopover in the UK and later headed for Washington DC.