Ex-Officer Gets 10 Months in Japan Spy Case
A former Japanese naval officer, arrested last year in Japan’s biggest spy scandal in two decades, was handed a 10-month jail sentence today for passing military secrets to Russia, a court official said.
Shigehiro Hagisaki, 38, a former lieutenant commander in the Maritime Self-Defense Force, was arrested in September on suspicion of giving classified documents to a Russian attache.
Sources involved in the investigation have said that police found a pile of military documents in Hagisaki’s home and that some were even related to U.S. naval operations in the Far East.
Hagisaki met the Russian military attache, Capt. Victor Bogatenkov, more than 10 times beginning in September 1999, the Kyodo news agency said.
From around March of last year, he received about $840 in yen at each meeting in exchange for internal documents, the agency said.
Domestic media have speculated that Hagisaki might have needed money to pay his terminally ill son’s medical bills.
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