Bulgarians convicted in UK of being Russian spies working for Wirecard fugitive

By Michael Holden and Sam Tobin

Three Bulgarians were found guilty in a London court on Friday of being part of a Russian spy unit run by Wirecard fugitive Jan Marsalek to carry out surveillance for the Kremlin on a U.S. military base and other individuals targeted by Moscow.

Marsalek tasked the sophisticated British-based Bulgarian team with spying on Ukrainian soldiers being trained at the U.S. base in Germany, with a view to tracking their movements on the battlefield after Russia's 2022 invasion, British prosecutors said.

Austrian national Marsalek is wanted by German authorities as the former chief operating officer of collapsed payments company Wirecard, accused of a major fraud.

Marsalek, whose current whereabouts are unknown but is believed to be in Russia, also discussed kidnapping journalists who were critical of the Kremlin and taking them back to Russia, prosecutors said.

"This was spying on an almost industrial scale on behalf of Russia, the Russian state and Russian intelligence services," said Commander Dominic Murphy, the head of London police's Counter Terrorism Command.

"We know that Marsalek was a go-between, between this group and Russian intelligence services."

There was no immediate comment from the Russian embassy in London, although the Kremlin has always rejected such spying allegations. Relations between the two nations have plunged to post-Cold War lows since the start of the Ukraine war, with Britain accusing Russia of trying to cause "mayhem" in Europe.

Marsalek's lawyer declined to comment.

HALF-BAKED PLANS

The Bulgarian unit's leader was Orlin Roussev, 47, who with his deputy Biser Dzhambazov, 43, and another man, Ivan Stoyanov, pleaded guilty to spying for Russia shortly before the trial, admitting charges of conspiring to collect information intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy.

Roussev paid Dzhambazov more than 200,000 euros ($216,880), some of which he transferred on to the defendants, prosecutors said.

On Friday, a jury at London's Old Bailey court found Katrin Ivanova, 43, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, guilty of the same offence, while Ivanova was also convicted of possessing false identity documents.

The two women told the jury he had misled them and all three claimed they either had no idea what the activity they had been involved in was about, or that they thought they were working for Interpol.

Their conversations, which were at the centre of the prosecution's case, contained half-baked plans and jokes about Russian operations on British soil, including the 2018 poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England.

Police said the evidence showed the Bulgarians carried out six serious operations under the instruction of Marsalek from 2021 until their arrest in 2023.

One of these was a plan to use an IMSI catcher to intercept mobile phone signals at the Patch barracks, a U.S. base near Stuttgart where Ukrainian troops were believed to be training to use surface-to-air Patriot missiles.

The pair later discussed plans to deploy the IMSI catcher in Britain in February 2023, shortly before five of the spy ring were arrested.

Another operation involved spying on Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian who worked for investigative website Bellingcat.

Grozev was the lead investigator on Bellingcat's reports about Skripal's poisoning. Marsalek and Roussev discussed stealing Grozev's computer and possibly kidnapping him and taking him to Russia or even killing him, said prosecutor Alison Morgan.

LISTENING DEVICES

The group also targeted British-based Russian Roman Dobrokhotov, editor in chief of The Insider, Bergey Ryskaliyev, a former Kazakh politician granted asylum in Britain, and Russian dissident Kiril Kachur.

The sixth operation involved staging a fake protest outside the Kazakh embassy in London, with a view to enabling Russia to pass information to Kazakh intelligence and gain favour with Kazakhstan, Morgan said.

Ivanova was convicted of possessing false identity documents after several documents – including fake Belgian, Bulgarian and French passports bearing Marsalek's photo – were found at her and Dzhambazov's home in north London.

Police also recovered 75 different passports and ID documents in 55 different names.

The trial heard Roussev and Dzhambazov referred to the other Bulgarians as "the minions", an apparent reference to the small, yellow characters in the Despicable Me animated film series. A plush toy with a spy camera was also found by police.

The group will be sentenced in May but the judge Nicholas Hilliard warned them that they faced jail terms.