Daily Nation, 7 July 2010: The father of a Russian arrested in the United States on espionage allegations ran an international tour firm in Nairobi. Russian media reported that Mr Vasily Kuschenko ran a tour firm known as 4vlast during his tour of duty at the Russian embassy as recently as 2006.
A Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, said the firm specialised in skydiving adventures. 4vlast is also the name of a group of Russian journalists and public relations specialists Mr Kuschenko worked with whose goal was to shape politics through the power of the press. According to the paper, Mr Kuschenko may have been put in charge of the tour firm’s operations in Kenya because of his extensive knowledge of the country. . . .
. . . . A retired senior diplomat told the Nation it was possible Mr Kuschenko could have spied on Kenya. “Some countries post officers to serve as first, second or third secretaries in other countries who in reality, are spies. It is only the ambassador who is vetted and cleared by the host country,” he said. . . .
Russian Ex-Boyfriend Calls Spy Suspect Secretive, Smart and Sweet (Moscow Times, 8 July 2010)
When Vyacheslav Serkov got a phone call last week from a friend asking whether his former high school sweetheart had been arrested in New York on suspicion of spying, he could not believe his ears. Serkov, 29, has known Anna Chapman, 28, since they attended eighth grade together at a school in Volgograd. He got the phone call on June 29, a day after the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had arrested Chapman and nine other suspects on suspicion of working for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
While Serkov said Chapman was sometimes secretive, he insisted that there was nothing wrong with that and expressed chagrin at the portrait of Chapman painted by the media. “She has always been secretive and warmhearted at the same time. There have always been a lot of friends around her,” said Serkov, who dated her for more than a year when they were about 15. . . .
. . . . Serkov said she was always smart and got top grades in all subjects in school. “Her main hobby was studying English,” he said, adding that she learned it well while living in Africa with her parents. Her father served as a diplomat in Kenya and Zimbabwe, but they wanted her to get a good education so they sent her to stay with her grandparents in Volgograd during her school years. . . .
Reuters, 26 April 2010: A group of Islamic clerics in northeastern Kenya said on Monday it was cracking down on public broadcasts of soccer and films because it feared young Kenyan Muslims were shunning Islamic traditions.
The group based in the town of Mandera on the border with Somalia said it had also put pressure on local administrators to back their television bans in a soccer-mad nation eagerly awaiting the World Cup in South Africa.
“If we come to a place where movies or watching football goes on we simply take everything and destroy the disc and repay the owners. We have now succeeded in 10 places,” Sheikh Daud Sheikh Mahmud, head of the group, told Reuters. “We will not stop until we have destroyed totally all the cinemas showing movies and football in this area,” he said by phone from Mandera. . . . .
