MOSCOW, August 27 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has withdrawn charges against two Novosibirsk scientists earlier accused of revealing state secrets, the FSB press service said Monday.
Oleg and Igor Minin, former research scientists at the Institute of Applied Physics based in Siberia, were accused in April of revealing sensitive information about current projects at an institute that conducts research for the Defense Ministry.
"The investigation established that there was no sufficient evidence implicating Oleg and Igor Minin," the FSB said in a statement.
The two scientists, who at present are working at the Novosibirsk State Technical University, recently wrote a monograph about their research at the Institute of Applied Physics, which prompted authorities to begin an investigation into possible state treason.
The defense lawyers for the accused insisted that all information contained in the monograph had been taken from unclassified sources and that charges against their clients were ungrounded.
It is the second recent case in which Russian scientists have been wrongly accused of alleged state treason.
The FSB launched an investigation last year against Oleg Korobeinichev, the head of the combustion kinetics laboratory at the Novosibirsk Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion, accusing him of revealing sensitive information on components of a rocket propellant in one of his scientific papers prepared for a U.S. institute.
FSB investigators dropped their case against him in May 2007, and prosecutors in Novosibirsk issued a rare apology to the scientist in July.
