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Wife of Russian pilot jailed in US for drug trafficking turns to Putin for help

© Photo : Konstantin Yaroshenko's lawyerThe wife of Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, whom the United States sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the country, has turned to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to help return her husband to Russia.
The wife of Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, whom the United States sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the country, has turned to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to help return her husband to Russia. - Sputnik International
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The wife of Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, whom the United States sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the country, has turned to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to help return her husband to Russia.

The wife of Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, whom the United States sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the country, has turned to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to help return her husband to Russia.

“I am asking you to provide my husband Yaroshenko K.V. with state defense and support, I am asking you to issue the necessary instructions to deport my husband to the Russian Federation,” Viktoria Yaroshenko said in a letter addressed to Putin.

The woman emphasized that after her husband was arrested, U.S. police held him without food and water for three days.

The United States put pressure on the pilot’s lawyers and they “are unable to provide him with legal assistance,” Viktoria’s letter said.

Konstantin Yaroshenko, 43, was arrested in an international drug bust in Liberia last year. A New York jury convicted him in April. He was sentenced on September 7.

Moscow has decried the verdict as a "virtual kidnapping of a Russian citizen" and pledged to fight for his release.

Agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) took custody of Yaroshenko after he was detained on May 28 last year by Liberian authorities and whisked him to New York without notifying Russia.

Yaroshenko said in an interview with the Russian Izvestiya daily published on Monday that he believed his trial was linked to the prosecution of suspected Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Bout, 44, was arrested in a U.S. sting operation in Thailand in 2008 and extradited to the U.S. in November 2010. Prosecutors maintain that the Russian, dubbed the Merchant of Death by a British politician, was negotiating the sale of heavy weaponry to FARC, a Colombian militant group, when he was arrested in Bangkok in March 2008. He denies all the charges against him. If found guilty, he could face life behind bars.

Yaroshenko said he was recently visited by a group of unfamiliar men who introduced themselves as lawyers and promised him “favors in prison” in exchange for information about Bout’s cargo transportation schemes.

But the pilot told the newspaper he had “never met with Bout and never flown his planes.”

“I first heard [Bout’s] name from agents on a flight from Liberia to the United States,” Yaroshenko said. “After three days of torture, I could hardly get it. I just understood that they were interested in what Bout was doing in Africa, particularly in Angola.”

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