MIAMI, Florida – Mexican scientist Héctor Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, detained in Miami since 2020, pleaded guilty Tuesday to committing espionage for Russia from the United States in a court in the city of Miami.
Wearing a beige prison uniform and handcuffed, the Mexican appeared today before Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks and pleaded guilty to acting within the United States as an agent of a foreign government.
“I plead guilty,” Cabrera told the judge after the Prosecutor’s Office read all his actions in United States territory to spy and deliver information about the country to a “security agent.” government” Russian.
Accompanied by his lawyers, Cabrera Fuentes answered several questions from the judge in English warning him of the consequences of pleading guilty, including that he could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
At the end of the hearing, Cabrera’s lawyers, who worked as a researcher in a health institution in Singapore before his arrest, did not want to speak to the press.
The Mexican, who will have a sentencing hearing again in May Next, he was arrested in February of 2020 while trying to travel to Mexico City from the Miami airport.
Cabrera Fuentes arrived in Miami a few days before his arrest on a temporary business and tourist visa with a woman he is married to in Mexico.
He later admitted to the Police that he had another wife in Russia, a country to which he was related for that reason and where, according to the investigation, he was allegedly recruited to do espionage.
The rented car that used during his stay in Miami was seen in a condominium where a confidential informant of the US Government lived in matters of national security, the Prosecutor’s Office recalled on Tuesday.
Photographs of the license plate of a vehicle belonging to that person were found on the cell phones of Cabrera and his Mexican wife, according to the documents.
In an interrogation in February of 2020 the Mexican spoke of having met in meetings in Russia a person who he believed worked for the Russian Government and with who met alone for the first time in May of 2019 in Moscow.
The “Russian official” told him that he could help him that his Russian wife and daughters could leave the country if he helped him with something.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, in September 2019 he asked him to rent an apartment in Miami in the same condominium where the informant lived from the American Government, but not to make the contract in his name or inform his Russian family of it.
The apartment was rented in December 20 a person close to Cabrera, who Who transferred him some $20,000 dollars to pay the deposit and the rent.
According to the documents, the official’s next assignment to Cabrera was to locate the informant’s vehicle in the condominium and write down the license plate number.
The official told him not to take pictures of the car, but Cabrera asked his wife to did.
According to the file, the next meeting with the Russian official was to be held in April or May 2020 and in it Cabrera was going to to pass on the information obtained, but before that he was arrested in Miami.