Three Bulgarians were judged guilty of espionage for Russia in Great Britain and throughout continental Europe as part of one of the largest Russian espionage rings ever discovered by the British police.
During a period of three years, the group, led by a Bulgarian IT specialist, Orlin Roussev, 47 years old, led six operations for journalists and critics of the Russian government, said the ministries, adding that they also conducted surveillance in a US military site in Germany, where they believed that Ukrainian soldiers had been trained.
“This case is a clear example of the growing quantity of cases of state threats with which we are dealing in the United Kingdom, in particular linked to Russia,” said Dominic Murphy, head of the command of the metropolitan police counter. “It also underlines a relatively new phenomenon on the basis of which the espionage is” outsourced “by some states.”
Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberva, 30 years old, and Tihomir Ivanva, 39 years old, all from London, were judged guilty by a jury on Friday to be part of a group of six Bulgarians who spied Russia between 2020 and 2023.
The three had denied the accusations against them, claiming not to know for those who were working or who had been lying from those higher in the chain. Before the start of the trial, Mr. Roussev, who lived in Great Yarmouth, had declared himself guilty of espionage, together with two other members of the group: Bizer Dzhambazov, 43, from London and Ivan Stoyanov, 34 years old. The group will be sentenced in May.
Commander Murphy said that the convictions were reached “following an extremely complex investigation in a group that was carrying out sophisticated surveillance operations in the United Kingdom and in Europe, on behalf of the Russian state”.
The court felt that the man at the center of conspiracy, Mr. Roussev, took orders from Jan Marsalk, an Austrian who, in turn, was identified as working for Russian intelligence services.
Marsalek is the former operational director of the Wirecard German payments company, which collapsed in 2020 with debts of over 3 billion euros (3.25 billion dollars.
The improbable heart of the espionage ring was a former 33 -room beach hotel in Great Yarmouth, on the eastern coast of England, owned by Mr. Roussev. When he was raiding by the police, they discovered sophisticated espionage equipment including listening devices, drones, cell phones, hidden cameras and a false identity card printer. The “spy glasses” were used to film at least one subject under surveillance.
Investigators sifted over 200,000 messages and seized hundreds of articles after a coordinated series of raids and arrests in February 2023.
The evidence discovered led the ministries to accuse the spy ring of taking surveillance in 2022 at Patch Barracks, a military garrison in the United States near Stuttgart, Germany.
It was also said that the group targeted two investigative journalists, Christo Grzev and Roman Dobrokhotov.
In a conversation on Telegram, the heads of heads discussed to robs and killing Mr. Grzev, a journalist from Bellingcat, or that they had robbed him and bringing him to Russia, said the ministries.
Another operation focused on a former Kazakhstan senior politician who was granted asylum in Great Britain after fleeing his country of origin.
It was also said that the group had planned a false protest in the Kazakhstan Embassy in London, hoping that, providing intelligence to the Kazakh government, they could help the Russian state to earn favor with Kazakhstan.
The surveillance operations extended to Montenegro to cover a man designated as a “foreign agent” from Russia.