New Russian ploy: Competing extradition requests

MOSCOW — The Russian spam kingpin had long been in the crosshairs of the F.B.I., and agents finally got their shot when the man scheduled a vacation in Spain. At the agency’s request, Spanish security officers in April arrested the man, Pyotr Levashov, who is accused of stuffing untold millions of inboxes with ads for pornography, pills and penny stocks.

But then the Russian authorities sprang a trap of their own, filing an extradition request with the Spanish authorities for a crime they said Levashov had committed in Russia years ago. Currently, he is languishing in a Spanish jail, but soon the authorities will have to decide which extradition request to honor: the United States’ or Russia’s.