Moscow (Alliance News) - The Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday accused the US of abducting a Russian citizen, but Washington suspects the man, who also happens to be the son of a Moscow lawmaker, of large-scale cyber fraud.

Roman Seleznyov was arrested by US secret service agents at the airport of Male, the capital of the Maledives, and forcibly put on a plane to Guam, the ministry said in a statement.

It called the incident "Washington's latest unfriendly act" and said that the US had ignored a 1999 treaty for legal assistance in criminal cases, practically kidnapping a Russian citizen.

However, the US maintains that Seleznyov is one of the world's most prolific traffickers of stolen financial information.

The Russian was arrested on July 5 on grounds of a 2011 US indictment for hacking into US retailers' systems and stealing credit card data, the Department of Homeland Security said.

It did not specify where the arrest took place, saying merely that the US Attorney in Guam was involved.

"This important arrest sends a clear message: despite the increasingly borderless nature of transitional organized crime, the long arm of justice - and this Department - will continue to disrupt and dismantle sophisticated criminal organizations," Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said.

The suspect's father Valery Seleznyov, a backbencher for the nationalist Liberal Democrat Party in the Russian State Duma, said that his son was not a programmer and could not be linked to such fraud, the Interfax news agency reported.

The Russian Foreign Ministry linked the incident to recent high-profile US cases against Russians, notably the 2008 arrest of suspected arms dealer Viktor Bout in Bangkok and the 2010 arrest of pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko on drug smuggling charges in Liberia.

Copyright dpa