US basketball star Brittney Griner released in Russia after prisoner swap

US basketball star Brittney Griner has been released from prison in Russia in a prisoner swap with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, a US official told CNN. The WNBA Phoenix Mercury athlete is now in the custody of US authorities.

US President Joe Biden is expected to make comments soon on the release.

Drug lord Viktor Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death”, is a former Soviet military officer serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States on charges of conspiring to kill Americans, acquiring and exporting anti-aircraft missiles and providing material support. to a terrorist organization.

Moscow criticized his 2012 sentencing as “baseless and biased”, and Bout has maintained his innocence.

Brittney Griner, who played for a Russian team in the off-season periods of the WNBA, had been detained since February, when she was arrested on drug trafficking charges at a Moscow-area airport.

Despite her testimony, in which she claimed that she had inadvertently packaged the cannabis oil found in her luggage, she was sentenced to nine years in prison in early August, and was transferred to a penal colony in Mordovia in mid-November after lose your appeal.

The exchange did not include Paul Whelan, another American whom the State Department considers wrongfully detained.

He is an American, Irish, British and Canadian citizen and was arrested at a Moscow hotel in December 2018 – Russian authorities claimed he was involved in an intelligence operation.

Whelan was sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges, which he vehemently denied.

He was serving his sentence in a forced labor camp in Mordovia, an eight-hour drive from Moscow, where he told CNN, in June 2021, who spent his days working in a clothing factory he called an “exploratory factory”.