The Investigative Committee did not find corpus delicti in the death of Novosibirsk physicist Dmitry Kolker after his arrest on suspicion of treason. The Investigative Committee forwarded the statement of the lawyer Alexander Fedulov to the FSB. Lawyer Pavel Chikov wrote about this in his Telegram channel.
On July 19, the Investigative Committee began an investigation into the death of a scientist in a pre-trial detention center a few days after his arrest. The cause was cancer of the last stage. Despite his illness, on June 30, a 54-year-old man was taken directly from a Novosibirsk hospital, flown to Moscow and placed in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center, where he died on July 3.
According to the son of the scientist Maxim Kolker, the physicist was accused of providing the People's Republic of China with data containing state secrets. Earlier, Dmitry Kolker traveled to China several times with lectures. On trips, he was accompanied by an FSB officer who made sure that the scientist did not communicate with students and colleagues in English, but only in Russian through an interpreter.
The scientist's son insists that the documents related to his father's scientific research did not contain state secrets. All of them underwent special examination.
Prior to this, Kolker refused to testify against the scientific director of the Institute of Laser Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Bagaev and the director of this institute Alexei Taychenachev. The latter became a defendant in a criminal case on abuse of power (part 1 of article 285 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) in October 2021. In February 2022, the 80-year-old academician Bagaev was detained in the case of a particularly large-scale fraud.
Dmitry Kolker headed the Laboratory of Quantum Optical Technologies at Novosibirsk State University. He was diagnosed with stage IV cancer and metastases. Previously, he went to a course of chemotherapy in a private clinic, but on June 29, his condition worsened and he was urgently hospitalized. The scientist's son is sure that when his father was taken from the hospital, no medicine was taken for him.