A 24-year-old Latvian-born woman has been put under house arrest in Texas after being caught allegedly trying to smuggle rifle scopes designed for assassinations to Russia.
Anna Fermanova was about to board a Moscow-bound plane with three night-vision sights designed to shoot targets up to 2.4km away before being intercepted by federal agents, the NY Daily News reported.
The US-raised woman told police she had bought the scopes for her husband's hunting buddies in Russia, a claim former NYPD detective Bo Dietl described as "crazy".
"These are used specifically for an assassination," he said.
"You could take someone out with one of these scopes in the dead of night from up to a mile-and-a-half away."
Sales of the high-powered scopes are limited to law enforcement and the military in the United States and require a special license to be exported.
Fermanova has been described in the US media as being the next sexy Russian spy after the recently exposed Anna Chapman, a claim her lawyer Scott Palmer denies.
"She is quite sexy, you could say, but she is not a spy," he said.
A student at the University of Phoenix, Arizona, Fermanova has spent much of her time in recent years teaching English to students in Moscow.
Fermanova has been put under house arrest in her parents' home in Plano, Texas, as she awaits court hearings.
Front page
RSS Feed