Three Bulgarian nationals have been found guilty of spying for Russia at the Old Bailey in London, in a trial that police described as one of the most significant espionage cases to be brought in Britain in decades.
Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, were each convicted of one count of conspiracy to spy on Friday.
Ivanova was also found guilty on a charge of possessing false identity documents with improper intent after more than 30 hours of deliberation by the jury.
Prosecutors had said the trio were part of a spy ring that operated between 2020 and 2023 under the direction of former Wirecard chief operating officer Jan Marsalek, acting under the name Rupert Ticz.
Marsalek is believed to have been recruited by Russian intelligence in 2014, and fled to Moscow after the payments group’s fraudulent activity was exposed in 2020.
Telegram messages shown to the court suggested that Marsalek — who did not face charges himself — was giving the Bulgarian group assignments on behalf of Russia’s military intelligence and domestic intelligence agencies, the GRU and the FSB.
Marsalek handed down orders from his Russian bosses to the ringleader of the group, Orlin Roussev, 46, who managed its activities from his house in Great Yarmouth, the court was told. Roussev and Biser Dzhambazov, 43, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to spy before the start of the trial. Ivan Stoyanov, 33, pleaded guilty to spying before the trial.
In her closing argument last month, prosecutor Alison Morgan KC told the jury that the ring was filling a “gap” in the “intelligence void” faced by Russia after a botched GRU operation to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018 prompted the expulsion of Russian spies from around Europe.
Ahead of the verdict, Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s SO15 counterterrorism command, described the police operation to uncover the spy ring as one of the biggest espionage investigations he had seen in more than two decades of counterterrorism work.
“This was spying on an almost industrial scale on behalf of the Russian state,” he told reporters, describing the group as a “serious threat”.
Murphy added that when he was first briefed on the group’s activities, they seemed like “something you expect to be reading in a spy novel”.
During the three-month trial, prosecutors told the jury that the defendants carried out surveillance between 2021 and 2022 against a number of targets, including journalists, dissidents and a US military base in Germany.
The court heard that Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian journalist for the investigative outlet Bellingcat, was followed and watched in late 2021 by various members of the group at his home, on flights and at a journalism conference.
Marsalek and Roussev discussed stealing his laptop, hacking his internet connection, kidnapping or killing him and infiltrating Bellingcat, according to Telegram messages.
Surveillance of Roman Dobrokhotov, editor of The Insider, a Russia-focused media outlet, ran in parallel. The ring used information obtained from Amadeus, a software used by the airline industry, to track his movements across Europe and follow him on a flight from Budapest to Berlin.
Marsalek and Roussev also discussed kidnapping Dobrokhotov and transporting him to Moscow.
Two operations were carried out to “curry favour” between Russia and Kazakhstan, prosecutors said.
In November 2021 Bergey Ryskaliyev, a Kazakh former politician who has been critical of the country’s ties to Russia, was tailed at a residential address in Kensington and the luxury apartment complex One Hyde Park.
The group also planned a false flag protest outside the Kazakh embassy in Pall Mall.
In late 2022, Dzhambazov and Ivanova travelled to Patch Barracks, a US military base in Stuttgart, where Marsalek believed Ukrainian troops were being trained to use surface-to-air weapons, the court heard.
Dzhambazov and Ivanova recorded images and videos of the compound’s perimeter and security set-up. Roussev and Marsalek discussed using an “IMSI catcher”, a device that can track mobile phones and extract sensitive information such as passwords.
Finally, in late 2021 and early 2022 the group decamped to Budva, an Adriatic resort town in Montenegro, to spy on Russian dissident Kirill Kachur, who was designated a foreign agent by Russia in 2023.
After renting a villa adjacent to a property owned by a woman they believed to be Kachur’s girlfriend, the group used drones and other spyware to record images of her and locate him.
During the period of the indictment, which ran between mid-2020 and early 2023, the group had access to 221 different mobile phones, 258 hard drives, 33 audio recorders and 55 video recorders and almost 500 Sim cards, according to Murphy.
Members of the ring had 11 drones, 16 radios, and 75 passports and identification documents in 55 different names. They also amassed a trove of everyday objects modified to hide surveillance devices including a rock, a pen, soft drink bottles, watches and two “spy ties”.
Each of the defendants maintained that they were misled by Roussev and Dzhambazov. Ivanova, the latter’s partner of 10 years, said she thought she was contributing to a Bellingcat-style website to expose corrupt journalists.
Gaberova — who also had a concurrent 18-month relationship with Dzhambazov — and Ivanchev, Gaberova’s ex-boyfriend, said they believed they were assisting Interpol, for which Dzhambazov falsely claimed to work.
Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s special crime and counter terrorism division, on Friday said that by targeting individuals in the UK fleeing persecution as well as journalists opposing the Russian regime, the group had “undermined the message that the UK is a safe country for those people”.
“This prolonged activity also undermined the security and safety of the UK; and there can be no doubt that each of the defendants knew exactly who they were spying for,” he added.
