79-year-old former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was convicted in 2002 by the US court for spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than 20 years and sentenced to life in prison, was found dead in his cell in a maximum security prison in the state of Colorado.
CAUSE OF DEATH NOT EXPLAINED
In the statement made by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it was stated that the prison staff provided first aid after finding Hanssen unresponsive in his cell in the morning, and that Hanssen could not be saved despite all the interventions. The statement did not specify the cause of Hanssen’s death.
Hanssen, who joined the FBI in 1976, began selling classified information to the Soviet Union in 1985, according to the FBI. When Hanssen was arrested in 2001, it was revealed that he had received bribes of more than $1.4 million in exchange for compromising numerous human resources, intelligence techniques and classified US documents. FBI investigators worked for years to identify the spy within the agency. According to the FBI, in the weeks before his arrest in February 2001, about 300 staff members were working on the investigation and monitoring Hanssen. (UAV)