TALLINN, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Police in Estonia detained a senior security official and his wife on Wednesday on suspicion of spying for former imperial master Russia, the second espionage scandal in the NATO-member Baltic state in recent years.
The country of 1.3 million people has chilly relations with Russia and spying incidents are not rare.
Interior Minister Ken-Marti Vaher told the Estonian state-owned broadcaster: "We face one of the world’s superpowers, which invests enormous financial resources in espionage, agents of influence, and subversion – especially in its neighbouring countries."
The Russian Foreign Ministry told Reuters it had no comment on the case.
Estonia regained its independence in 1991 after 50 years of rule by Moscow and joined the European Union and NATO in 2004. It suffered what it says was a Russian-led cyber-attack in 2007.
"Two people were detained this morning at Tallinn airport and are under investigation for treason," said Harrys Puusepp, a spokesman for the Security Police, the country’s counter-espionage and anti-terrorism force.
He named the detainees as Aleksei Dressen, an employee of the Security Police, and his wife Viktoria Dressen.
"It is believed that he was passing information to the Russian FSB for some years," he said, referring to Russia’s successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
He said the two had not yet been charged and were giving their statements. The couple had some state secret documents with them, he added.
In 2008, Estonians and NATO allies were shocked by the arrest of senior Defence Ministry official Herman Simm for spying for Russia.
Simm was sentenced in 2009 to 12 years in jail after being found guilty of handing over more than 2,000 pages of information, including top secret NATO documents, to his handlers in Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service.
Police would not say what material Dressen is suspected of sending to Moscow. They said he was a long-time employee of the Security Police, though not in the senior management.
