Vicky Peláez, the Peruvian journalist who had been working in the United States where she spied for Russia, is set to return to Peru in about a week, daily Peru.21 reported. Peláez is currently working on obtaining documents to leave Moscow, her lawyer Carlos Moreno said.
“From what I understand, in a week, in a few days more, she could be in Peru and finally speak, [provide] an explanation from her own point of view,” Moreno said.
Vicky Peláez was arrested in June along with her husband, Juan Lázaro, at their home in the city of Yonkers, a New York suburb.
Her husband was originally thought to be a Uruguayan national, however it was later revealed that he had forged his identification. Lázaro’s – a Russian national – original name is Mikhail Vasenkov.
Peláez, 55, had previously worked as a reporter for Peruvian television station Frecuencia Latina during the 1980s. She was working as a senior columnist for the New York-based paper El Diario/La Prensa when the FBI made the sweeping arrests, which culminated from a multi-year federal investigation. U.S. authorities said Peláez and her husband were members of a network that was responsible for collecting information for Russia.
The defendants pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country.