"There is no doubt that the action carried out by Walter Biot was also dictated by political purposes, which he undoubtedly procured through photographic acquisition of the documents containing the secret and confidential information" in order "to reveal them to the diplomatic agent of the Russian Federation" with the "clear aim of favoring a state foreign to the Atlantic Alliance" and with the "concrete endangerment of the interests protected by the rules".
This is what the judges of the Court of Assizes of Rome wrote in the reasons for the sentence with which on January 19th they sentenced the naval officer accused of espionage to 20 years. For the magistrates "the accused's conduct was detrimental to the interests of the state political organization in its structures and also in relations with supranational bodies to which the state belongs".
In over
130 pages of reasons,
the judges reconstruct the story of the Frigate captain, already sentenced to 29 years by the military appeal judges, stating that the conduct "in the acquisition and transmission of news" followed "uncommon precautions and precautions to don't get caught."
A modus operandi continued "until the delivery of the micro SD to the Russian diplomat for monetary compensation". A conduct that "certainly further contributes to defining in the specific case that the information he was providing had to have a certain significant impact on the secrecy and confidentiality of the information itself, even more so if re-evaluated in light of the most recent geopolitical facts connected to the war in Ukraine and to the current relations of NATO and the Alliance countries with the Russian Federation''.
The judges of the Assizes add that Biot "chose not to carry out the interrogation during the validation of the arrest in flagrante delicto, and not to carry out the examination during the trial, limiting himself to representing, during spontaneous declarations, that did not have access to the secret NATO documents and the devices containing them and, therefore, did not have full knowledge of the accusations to be able to usefully defend himself. He therefore did not offer any contribution of clarification or alternative explanation to the overall and substantial evidential framework of relevance gravity that attaches to it, not even regarding the conduct that led to the arrest in flagrante delicto".
According to the magistrates, the accused "made a distorted use of his functions contrary to his official duties".