Dutch authorities months ago arrested and expelled two suspected Russian spies for allegedly trying to hack a Swiss laboratory that conducts chemical weapons tests, the Swiss government confirmed on Friday as it summoned the Russian ambassador to protest an “attempted attack.”
Moscow quickly rejected the accusation, the latest Western claim about Russian spying and other acts of interference.
The alleged target was the Spiez Laboratory, which analyzed samples from the March poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England.
The Swiss confirmation came after Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reported that two Russians suspected of being agents of military intelligence service GRU were earlier this year kicked out of the Netherlands as a result of a Europe-wide investigation.
Tages-Anzeiger said the two men were arrested in The Hague, Netherlands, during the spring, but the exact location and timing were unclear.
The Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) said it worked “actively” with British and Dutch partners on the case.
“The Swiss authorities are aware of the case of Russian spies discovered in The Hague and expelled from the same place,” FIS spokeswoman Isabelle Graber said.
She said the agency helped prevent “illegal actions against a critical Swiss infrastructure” and declined further comment.
The Swiss attorney general’s office said “two individuals” involved in the alleged hacking emerged during a broader investigation of alleged “political espionage” that was opened in March last year.
The Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it summoned the Russian ambassador to “protest against this attempted attack” and demanded that Russia “immediately” end its spying activities on Swiss soil.
However, Russia’s top diplomat scoffed at the time it took for the case to come to public light.
“I cannot suppose that such an occurrence, in which the specialists of three Western countries participated, could remain out of the field of view of the mass media,” Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov told reporters after meeting with his German counterpart in Berlin, Russian news agencies said.
The Russian state news agency Tass quoted Stanislav Smirnov, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Switzerland, as calling the Dutch news report “absurd.”
“We believe that this is a new anti-Russian bogus story made up by the Western media,” Smirnov was quoted as saying. “It is absurd, just new groundless allegations.”
The Dutch Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in March announced that the Netherlands had expelled two Russian intelligence agents.
The action came amid a wave of Western nations ejecting Russian diplomats to protest the poisoning of the Skripals.
Spiez Laboratory spokesman Andreas Bucher declined to comment on the events in the Netherlands, but said the lab had taken precautions and no data were lost.
“We have had indications that we have been in the crosshairs of hackers in the last few months,” he said.
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