Chinese national pleads guilty to smuggling dangerous pathogens into Michigan
A Chinese national who was charged with smuggling dangerous pathogens into Michigan has pleaded guilty.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, 33-year-old Yunqing Jian, from the People's Republic of China, was sentenced on Wednesday to time served.
Jian, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, was arrested in June along with her boyfriend, Zunyong Liu, for smuggling in a fungus called Fusarium graminearum. The noxious fungus is known to cause "head blight," a disease that affects barley, rice, wheat and maize, resulting in economic losses worth billions of dollars each year.
Liu is in China and is not likely to return to the U.S., officials say. Jian initially pleaded not guilty in September.
"We must stop Chinese Nationals who are smuggling potentially catastrophic biomaterials. We cannot allow these smugglers to work in the shadows at the University of Michigan. This felony conviction and sentence are a small but important measure against secret biological threats from China. We remain thankful for the work of our elite federal partners—ICE, HSI, FBI, and CBP," said U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon in a statement.
Another person, 28-year-old Chengxuan Han, was also arrested in June and pleaded no contest to three smuggling charges and to making false statements to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. Han was sentenced in September to time served and returned to China.
Last week, federal investigators charged three other Chinese nationals with conspiracy to smuggle goods into the U.S. and false statements. Court records show that all three men traveled on J-1 visas as scholars at the University of Michigan and lived in Ann Arbor.
A criminal complaint stated that a package intended for one of the men contained Caenorhabditis elegans, which was also known as roundworms.
"Smuggling biological pathogens into the United States from China is a threat to the citizens of Michigan and America as a whole," said Jennifer Runyan, special agent in charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office. "FBI Detroit works around the clock to disrupt any threats to national security no matter when and from where they come. This outcome would not be possible without the exceptional efforts of the FBI Detroit Counterintelligence Task Force, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Office of Field Operations and HSI."