The Court of Assizes of Rome sentenced Navy officer Walter Biot to 20 years , arrested in March 2021 in a parking lot of a shopping center in the capital while he was busy giving classified information to officials of the Russian embassy.
The charges contested by the Rome prosecutors, who had asked for 18 years, also include espionage and corruption.
The illicit operation was carried out, according to the accusation, in exchange for money. Biot, currently detained in the military prison of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, has already been sentenced in first instance by the "starred" court to 30 years of imprisonment. In the trial before the first Assize Court, the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of Defense represented by the State Attorney's Office acted as civil parties.
The trial documents contain a series of NATO documents, nine of which are classified as "highly confidential", but also images. It is not specified whether of military bases or other. There are 181 screenshots and at least 106 of the documents. The 56-year-old frigate captain he was stopped in the act of committing a crime by the ROS carabinieri on 30 March three years ago in the car park of a supermarket on the outskirts of Rome while in exchange for 5 thousand euros he gave it to Dmitri Ostroukhov, assistant to the naval attaché of the Russian embassy in Rome Alexey Nemudrov - both were then expelled -, a SIM with the material that he had photographed with a cell phone from a PC in his office at the Defense General Staff.
Here - in a structure that was responsible for the projection of all Italian defense assets into foreign operational theaters and of the international police of the Italian armed forces under the aegis of NATO, EU and UN - Biot worked with access authorization credentials to military documents. Specifically, in light of the investigations carried out by the military personnel, there were 47 "Nato secret" pieces of news, 57 "Nato confidential" pieces of information and 9 classified as "very confidential".
