WASHINGTON, March 20. /TASS/. The US side has promised to settle all issues related to Russian citizen Mira Terada’s return to the home country by early April, the Russian Consulate General in Houston told TASS on Friday.
"On March 19, 2021, a diplomat of the Russian Consulate General in Houston visited the detention center in LaSalle (Louisiana), where Mira Terada is awaiting her deportation from the US. She is in good health and mood, and hopes to reunite with the loved ones in her homeland soon," Russian diplomats said
On the same day, the Consulate General diplomat met with a deputy head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regional office and handed over to him documents needed for Terada’s return to Russia.
"The official promised to solve organizational issues related to the Russian citizen’s departure from the United States as quickly as possible, before the first decade of April is over," the Russian Consulate General said.
"Terada thanked the consulate for attention to her situation and for efforts to take her back home," the Russian diplomats said. "We keep this situation under control and will work for Terada’s soonest return in close coordination with the Russian Embassy in the US."
On December 15, 2018, Finland’s Border Guard authority detained Mira Terada (Oksana Vovk before 2017), a Russian national born in 1988 who was on her way from St. Petersburg to Spain with a stopover at Helsinki Vantaa Airport. The Finnish authorities notified the Russian side about the incident on the same day. Thus, they said that the woman was nabbed on the basis of the Interpol arrest warrant issued at the request of the US authorities. She was extradited to the United States on June 20, 2019. The US accused her of drug trafficking and money laundering while living in the United States in 2013-2016.
In February 2020, a US federal court in Alexandria, Virginia sentenced Terada to 30 months behind bars on charges of money laundering. The court counted as jail term the eight months she spent in pretrial detention in the US and the six months in a Finnish prison.
The Russian citizen was released from jail on February 4 and currently remains in Louisiana pending her deportation to Russia. Terada’s Russian passport was lost while she was in detention.