Izvestia said it is the first case in modern Russia of a foreign secret service agent being charged with first degree murder.
Christopher Gardner, 29, who served in a counterintelligence unit at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, met his Russian wife Svetlana in South Korea, where he underwent military service, and where she worked as a "hostess". They eventually married.
The couple was seen only once in the home of 53-year-old Alexander Kaminsky in the city of Khabarovsk, when Chris and Svetlana arrived to attend the funeral of her aunt. Izvestia said the most important thing to the couple was a single-room apartment left to them in the will, worth $30,000.
After the funeral, Svetlana told her uncle she intended to sell the apartment, and encouraged him to move out. Kaminsky refused, saying he was registered in the apartment and had nowhere else to go.
What happened next, only Garnder and his wife know exactly. The American said a row began, during which Kaminsky grabbed Svetlana by the hands and threatened the couple with a bunch of keys, and then with a metal wire. Gardner said he feared Kaminsky was about to kill his wife and then him, so he took the uncle's life in self defense.
The officer's defense lawyer said the killing was not deliberate, but investigators point out that the victim was strangled with a metal wire - twice.
Izvestia wrote that the couple called a taxi to take the corpse out of the city to village of Solnechny, and that local residents alerted police. The taxi driver, after discovering blood in the trunk of his car after the trip, also called the police, and the couple was put on a wanted list.
After hiding for a few days at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Christopher and Svetlana were persuaded to give themselves up to police, and were arrested on September 9.
Gardner faces six to fifteen years in prison.
"He is behaving calmly, reading the Bible," investigator Sergei Zhigalin said. "Svetlana Gardner has not been charged."
