Italy has extradited a 33-year-old Chinese man arrested at Milan’s Malpensa airport in July 2025 on a US warrant for alleged hacking and espionage on COVID vaccines and therapies, sources said.
According to the FBI, Zewei Xu was part of a team that allegedly obtained information on COVID-19 research, especially from the University of Texas, starting in February 2020 at the start the outbreak of the pandemic.
Xu is accused of being part of “a large-scale cyber intrusion campaign” by the People’s Republic of China, which “targeted thousands of computers around the world”.
On April 16, the supreme Court of Cassation rejected a defence petition against the Milan Court of Appeal’s decision in January to uphold the extradition request.
Xu, an IT manager for a company in Shanghai, said it was a case of mistaken identity.
