3 Bulgarians convicted of spying for Russia in the UK

Three U.K.-based Bulgarians were found guilty of being part of a Russian spy ring directed by Wirecard fugitive Jan Marsalek.

Katrin Ivanova, Vanya Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanchev were convicted of espionage charges in what concluded a three-month trial at the Old Bailey court for being junior members of the six-member group. They operated between August 2020 and February 2023.

The spy ring was run by Marsalek, an internationally wanted fugitive Austrian businessman who is believed to have fled to Russia five years ago after German payments company Wirecard — which he helped to run — collapsed amid multibillion-euro fraud.

According to the prosecutors, the members of the group carried out surveillance of journalists, in particular Bulgarian investigative reporter Christo Grozev, who exposed the spies responsible for poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The ring also spied on Ukrainian soldiers training at a U.S. military base in Germany, in order to locate them when they returned to Ukraine.

“I have never seen anything like this in my more than 20 years in counterterrorism. It was an extremely sophisticated operation,” the Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism chief, Commander Dominic Murphy, told PA news agency.

“Really sophisticated devices — the sort of thing you would really expect to see in a spy novel — were found here, in Great Yarmouth and London,” he added.

The trio pleaded not guilty, saying they did not know they were helping Russia. Ivanova was also found guilty of possessing fake passports.

Three other members of the spy ring — Orlin Roussev, Bizer Dzhambazov and Ivan Stoyanov, 32 — previously pleaded guilty.

The six will be sentenced in May.