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[Second Issue of the Day]
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Russian prosecutor seeks tougher sentence for Pasko
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia, Dec 29 (Reuters) - A military prosecutor has launched an appealed for a tougher punishment to be imposed on journalist and ex-navy captain Grigory Pasko, saying his four-year jail term for treason is too lenient.
"The court excluded without grounds a series of episodes incriminating Grigory Pasko and handed down an excessively lenient sentence," the prosecutor's office in the Pacific Fleet said in comments made public on Saturday.
Naval prosecutor Alexander Kondakov advised on Friday that he would try to overturn the sentence imposed when Pasko, a military journalist, was convicted by a military court this week on charges of passing state secrets to Japan.
Pasko's lawyers also made known that they were appealing against the verdict. The defence team had expected him to be cleared at his retrial in the Pacific port of Vladivostok -- which has underscored concerns of media freedom in post-Soviet Russia.
Human rights groups have expressed outrage at the sentence.
A panel of three judges found the ex-navy captain guilty of high treason in the form of espionage and ordered he serve his sentence in a high security prison. The court threw out nine of 10 charges against him but Pasko strongly disputed the verdict.
Pasko had been found guilty of a lesser charge after an earlier trial and, though freed under an amnesty, had sought the retrial to prove his innocence.
Pasko's defence was built on a Russian law stipulating that information about environmental dangers could not be classified. He was incriminated passing to a Japanese newspaper data on where in the Sea of Japan the navy dumped toxic waste.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) domestic intelligence agency, which brought the case, said the principal issue was not of covering up environmental damage, but of punishing an officer who had disclosed secret information.
Pasko was arrested in November 1997 by counter-intelligence agents on his return from Japan and spent 20 months in prison before his first trial. The retrial came against the background of various cases by the FSB against ecologists and researchers after Putin, a former FSB chief, became head of state.
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