U.S. Army soldier arrested on suspicion of espionage
A U.S. Army specialist who was serving as a military policeman has been arrested at an Alaska military base on suspicion of spying, an Army spokesman said on Tuesday.
Specialist William Colton Millay, 22, was taken into custody at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on October 28 following a joint espionage investigation by the FBI and Army Counterintelligence special agents, Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bill Coppernoll said.
“We do expect to prefer charges sometime this week,” Coppernoll told Reuters. He said the charges would be brought under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the FBI said the case would be tried in military courts.
Coppernoll did not say who Millay, of Owensboro, Kentucky, was suspected of spying for or what sensitive information he may have had access to. He said the investigation was ongoing.
FBI spokesman Special Agent Eric Gonzalez said the arrest was not related to the WikiLeaks case, in which U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is charged with downloading more than 150,000 diplomatic cables and passing some of them to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.
“It’s unrelated, forget WikiLeaks,” Gonzalez told Reuters.