Italian authorities arrested a Chinese national accused by the United States of working at the direction of Beijing to steal COVID-19 vaccine research from U.S. universities, immunologists and virologists during the early days of the pandemic.

Xu Zewei, 33, of China, was arrested Thursday in Malan. The nine-count indictment charging him and his co-conspirator, 44-year-old Chinese national Zhang Yu, was unsealed Tuesday by the Justice Department as it seeks Xu’s extradition. Zhang remains at large.

The arrest and filing of charges are the latest U.S. law enforcement action targeting Chinese nationals accused of working at the behest of Beijing’s foreign intelligence arm, the Ministry of State Security, in recent months.

According to the indictment, Xu and his coconspirators were involved in the China state-sponsored HAFNIUM hacking campaign — also known as Silk Typhoon — that targeted vulnerabilities in the widely used Microsoft Exchange Server program to gain access to victims’ information from February 2020 to June 2021.

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