DETROIT (AP) — U.S. authorities have charged five Chinese nationals with lying and trying to cover their tracks, more than a year after they were confronted in the dark near a remote military site in Michigan where thousands of people had gathered for summer exercises.
The five, then University of Michigan students, were not charged in what happened at Camp Grayling in August 2023. Instead, they are accused of misleading investigators about the trip and conspiring to delete photos from their phones, according to a criminal complaint. filed in federal court.
The FBI noted in Tuesday's lawsuit that there have been instances in which students from China took photos of vital defense sites in the United States.
There was nothing in the file that revealed the whereabouts of the five men.
“The suspects are not in custody. Should they come into contact with U.S. authorities, they will be arrested and face these charges,” Gina Balaya, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit, said Wednesday.
In the summer of 2023, the five were confronted by a sergeant major of the Utah National Guard at a lake after midnight. One said, “We are media,” before gathering their belongings and agreeing to leave the area, the FBI said.
The FBI discovered that the men had booked a room at a nearby motel a week before they were spotted outside Camp Grayling, 200 miles (321.8 kilometers) north of Detroit.
Four months later, one of the men was interviewed by border agents at Detroit's airport before traveling to South Korea and China. He told investigators that he and others had taken a trip to northern Michigan “to see shooting stars,” the FBI said.
A check of his external hard drive revealed two images of military vehicles taken the same night of the encounter with the National Guard officer, the FBI said.
The other four men were interviewed last March after arriving in Chicago on a flight from Iceland. They acknowledged they were in northern Michigan in August 2023, but said it was a meteor shower, the FBI said.
They mentioned the National Guard officer, but referred to him only as “the soldier,” a camper or “nice guy,” according to the complaint.
The men communicated via WeChat last December about deleting photos from their cameras and phones, investigators said.
According to the FBI, all five men graduated from the University of Michigan last spring. They were part of a joint program between the university and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China.
In 2020, two Chinese nationals pursuing master's degrees at the University of Michigan were sentenced to prison for illegally photographing locations at a naval air station in Key West, Florida.
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