A longtime scientist for a U.S. laboratory in New Mexico pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges that he lied about contacts he had with a state-run program in China that seeks to draw foreign-educated talent. "If he fled, it would quite frankly be a national security disaster," said George Kraehe, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Mexico. He began working for Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1999, according to the lab's website. Lookman, a computational physics expert, received at least two awards while working at Los Alamos and co-authored two books, according to the lab's website. Chunzai Wang's sentence came after he pleaded guilty to a charge of accepting a salary from another source while working for the U.S. agency.

Source: ABC News May 28, 2019 21:29 UTC