Five Chinese nationals were indicted Wednesday on federal charges of conspiracy, lying to federal investigators and destroying records related to a bizarre midnight visit to a Michigan Army National Guard base in August 2023.
The defendants were students at the University of Michigan at the time. I got caught The camera was captured near a large-scale National Guard live-fire training exercise at Camp Grayling. The exercise, dubbed “Northern Strike,” involved military vehicles and classified communications equipment. Visitors from Taiwan also participated in the training.
The charges filed Wednesday were not about the students' suspicious activity near the military base, but rather about false statements they made to investigators. After bypassing large amounts of warning tape and “no trespassing” signs to enter the northern strike area, the five Chinese nationals pretended to be members of the media and fled the area when approached by National Guard officers. .
Local police soon discovered that the five people had booked into a motel in Grayling, apparently for the purpose of observing military exercises.
One of the students, 23-year-old Renshan Guan, changed her story a few months later after she was detained at Detroit Metropolitan Airport while trying to travel to Shanghai. Mr Guan claimed the five of them were “stargazing”, but two photos of military vehicles taken on the day of his visit to Grayling Camp were found on his personal electronic device.
Four other students – Zhekhai Xu, 22 years old. Haoming Zhu, 21 years old. Tao Jingze, 22 years old. and Yi Liang, 23, were interrogated by the FBI three months later when they arrived at Chicago O'Hare International Airport from Iceland.
The quartet gave inconsistent statements to FBI agents, including the improbable claim that they had visited Camp Grayling on a rainy, cloudy night to see a meteor shower. They also gave contradictory statements about whether they knew they were near a military base and made false statements about when they booked their motel rooms.
The FBI also found WeChat messages in which the defendants admitted to deleting photos from their cameras and cell phones and using third parties to carry their electronic devices to avoid search during their trip to Iceland.
“The subjects discussed their encounter with (the sergeant) at Bear Lake, attempted to reconcile their accounts of what happened so that their stories would match if any of them were questioned in the future, and Criminal charges against five Chinese students say they 'deleted potentially incriminating photos from their phones and cameras to prevent law enforcement from finding them' said.
The complaint alleges that Chinese students, including two other University of Michigan students who were caught taking photos at Florida's Key West Naval Air Station in 2020, were involved in what appeared to be surveillance of sensitive U.S. facilities. He also mentions other cases where this was done.
Although the two Chinese nationals in the Key West incident were ultimately sentenced to prison, Wednesday's indictment against the five students alleges that they attended the University of Michigan as part of a two-year joint program with Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2019. It is shown that he left the country in 2007. The completion date is May 2024. None of the five are currently in custody.
“If they come into contact with U.S. authorities, they will be arrested and face these charges,” Detroit U.S. Attorney's Office spokeswoman Gina Baraya said Wednesday.
