Who is Kseniia Petrova? Harvard researcher from Russia facing deportation charged with smuggling

Russian-born Harvard Medical School cancer scientist, Kseniia Petrova, who was taken to a Louisiana immigration detention centre three months ago and was already facing deportation, was on Wednesday charged with smuggling goods into the United States, reported PTI.

According to an AP report, Petrova's lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, asked on Thursday that she be brought back to Massachusetts. The request was made shortly after a federal district court judge set a hearing on her release.

“She has requested a transfer to Massachusetts, where the complaint was filed,” her lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, said in a statement, as quoted by AP. “We expect federal authorities to transfer her to Massachusetts in the next few weeks.”

If Petrova is convicted, she would face a sentence of up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Who is Kseniia Petrova?

NBC News reported that Kseniia Petrova is a 30-year-old Russian scientist who has played a key role in creating computer programs to harness the full potential of a revolutionary microscope at Harvard.

In mid-February, while she was vacationing in France, she visited a lab specialising in splicing superfine sections of frog embryos and obtained a package of samples for research.

When she passed through a US Customs and Border Protection checkpoint at Boston Logan International Airport, she was questioned and arrested, as per the NBC report.

Following this, she was held at ICE's Richwood Correctional Centre in Monroe, Louisiana and was battling deportation back to Russia.

She is afraid that if she is deported to Russia, she will be prosecuted and put behind bars, as she had been vocal in her protests against the war in Ukraine, NBC News reported. She fled after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Meanwhile, principal research scientist at Harvard's Department of Systems Biology and Petrova's manager, Dr Leon Peshkin, stated that she was detained as she failed to declare samples of frog embryos to be used in scientific research, reported NBC News.

What does her lawyer say?

Petrova's lawyer said Customs and Border Protection officials had no legal basis for cancelling Kseniia's visa and detaining her.

He claimed that her transfer from ICE to criminal custody was an attempt by the government to justify its outrageous and legally indefensible position that this scientist working for the US on cures for cancer and ageing research has somehow become a danger to the community."

What did Department of Homeland Security say?

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on the social platform X that Petrova was detained after “lying to federal officers about carrying substances into the country”. They allege messages on her phone “revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them”.

With agency inputs.