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UK looking for ways to ban Anna Chapman’s return
Officials are investigating ways to legally bar her after she announced her intention to move back to the country where she had lived for seven years.
Updated : Nov 21, 2013, 01:44 PM IST
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The British Home Office is looking for ways to stop the Russian spy Anna Chapman, from returning to the country.
According to The Telegraph, officials are investigating ways to legally bar her after she announced her intention to move back to the country where she had lived for seven years.
Anna was granted a passport a year after getting married to Englishman Alex Chapman in 2003, but could be stripped of her British citizenship by the Home Secretary following her deportation from the US on spy charges.
Under section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981, Home Secretary Theresa May is entitled to confiscate the spy's passport if it is considered "conducive to the public good".
Chapman may also be banned on the grounds that she secured citizenship by means of "fraud, false representation or concealment of material fact".
Earlier, Robert Baum, who represented Chapman in the US, said that his client considers Britain her home.
"She wants to spend some time in the UK as well as Russia. She has lived in the UK for almost seven years and it is somewhere that in her life she called home and she would like to return," he said.
Anna and nine other Russian spies were flown on an American Boeing 767 to Austria, where they met a Russian jet waiting on the runway to take them home.
As a part of the deal, Russia returned back four spies who had been imprisoned for their links with MI6 and the CIA which they were handing over.
The meeting on the tarmac of Vienna airport was the biggest exchange of spies for 24 years.
As part of the deal, Chapman and her fellow spies are banned from returning to America.
A spokeswoman for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that he had agreed to pardon the four men Russia released after they had signed written confessions admitting to their "earlier crimes."
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a terse statement that the Kremlin had agreed to the spy swap on "humanitarian grounds" in the spirit of growing co-operation with the United States.
