Russia’s FSB security agency said on Tuesday it had detained a Japanese journalist for alleged espionage, and Moscow’s foreign ministry said it regretted that Tokyo was using correspondents to carry out spying.
In a statement on its website, the FSB said the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper journalist was detained in the far eastern Sakhalin region on the day before he planned to leave Russia. It did not specify when this was.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a statement identified the journalist as Imai Yuki, according to the Russian transliteration of his name, and said his detention cast a new pall on relations with Tokyo.