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| - A Russian court has ordered a physics professor kept in detention for two months on suspicion of treason, a court spokeswoman said Tuesday. After the professor, Valery Golubkin, was detained on Monday, Moscow's Lefortovsky district court ordered him held until June 12, court spokeswoman Darya Rozmakhova said. "He's a suspect. The charges have not been laid out so far," she told AFP, without providing further details. Golubkin teaches a course on high-speed aerodynamics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a top Russian physics university. A spokesman for the institute, Igor Krasikov, said Golubkin's main employer is the Zhukovsky Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI). A spokeswoman for TsAGI declined immediate comment, describing the institute as a "high-security facility." Golubkin's lawyer Alexander Timoshenko told AFP that the 69-year-old physics professor maintained his innocence. He had been involved in "normal international cooperation" on various projects, but Golubkin insisted that he had not committed treason, said the lawyer. His client was a cancer survivor and in poor health, he added. Several other people have recently been detained in related cases, Timoshenko added, but he was not at liberty to provide more details. Treason cases in Russia are typically classified. Another employee of TsAGI, Anatoly Gubanov, was arrested in December on suspicion of treason for having allegedly handed over classified information to the West. In recent years, a wide range of Russians including scientists have been accused of high treason or disclosing state secrets. as/emg/jj
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