Another Chinese scientist has been charged with smuggling biological materials into the United States after a University of Michigan student and her boyfriend were caught last week.
Chengxuan Han was arrested on Sunday at Detroit Metropolitan airport and charged with smuggling goods into the US.
Police allege Han sent four packages which ‘contained biological material related to round worms’ from China to the US.
The packages were sent between September 2024 and March 2025 and addressed to people linked to the laboratory at the University of Michigan.
Han initially denied sending the packages at all, according to court documents. She later insisted they contained plastic cups, rather than petri dishes.
According to the documents, she ultimately admitted sending the samples, which she had collected during her research as a Ph.D. student in Wuhan, China.
The charges come less than a week after University of Michigan postdoctoral fellow Yunqing Jian, 33, was charged alongside Zunyong Liu, 34, for attempting to smuggle a weapon of ‘agroterrorism’ into the United States in a sinister plot allegedly tied to the Chinese Communist Party.