Three Bulgarians have been found guilty of spying on Russia in the former Bailey in London, and were found in a trial that police described as one of the most important spying cases brought to Britain in decades.
Katlin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gavelova, 30, and 39-year-old Tikhomir Ivanchev were convicted on Friday in a count of one of the spy conspiracy.
Ivanova was also found guilty of possessing false identity documents with inappropriate intent after more than 30 hours of deliberation by the ju judge.
Prosecutors said the trio was part of a spyring run between 2020 and 2023 under the direction of former Willecard chief operating officer Jan Marsalek.
Marsalek is believed to have been adopted by the Russian intelligence agency in 2014 and fled to Moscow in 2020 after payment group fraud was exposed.
Telegram messages presented to the court suggested that Marsalek, who had given the allocation of Bulgarian groups on behalf of the Russian military intelligence and national intelligence reporting agencies, the GRU and the FSB, was giving the allocation of Bulgarian groups.
Marsalek passed the orders from the Russian boss to the mastermind of the 46-year-old group, the mastermind of the group that managed the activities from his home in Great Yarmouth. Roussev, 43, and Biser Dzhambazov pleaded guilty to Spy’s conspiracy before the trial began. Ivan Stoyanov, 33, pleaded guilty to spying before trial.
In the final discussion last month, prosecutor Alison Morgan KC told the ju judge that it was filling the “gap” of the “intelligence void” that Russia faced after the 2018 GRU operation to poison his daughter in Sergei Skripal and Salisbury.
Prior to the verdict, Dominique Murphy, head of Metropolitan Police’s SO15 Counter Terrorism Command, described the police operations to uncover the spying as one of the biggest spying activities he has seen over 20 years of terrorism.
“This was spying on a nearly 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 explained about the group’s activities, they seemed like “what they expect to read in spy novels.”
In a three-month trial, prosecutors told the ju judge that the defendant conducted surveillance between 2021 and 2022 on many targets, including German journalists, dissidents and US military bases.
The court heard that in late 2021, various members of the home, flight and journalism conferences, Christo Grozeff, a Bulgarian journalist at the Investigation Outlet Belling Cat, was tracked and monitored in late 2021.
According to Telegram’s message, Marsalek and Roussev discussed stealing his laptop, hacking his internet connection, lure or killing him, and infiltrating Bellingcat.
Surveillance of Romand Brokotov, editor of Insider, a media outlet focused on Russia, was carried out in parallel. The ring tracked his movements across Europe using information obtained from Amadeus, software used in the aviation industry, and followed him on a flight from Budapest to Berlin.
Marsalek and Roussev also discussed luring Dobrokhotov to transport him to Moscow.
Prosecutors said two operations were carried out on “curry favors” between Russia and Kazakhstan.
In November 2021, Bergay Liskariev, a former Kazakh politician who is critical of the country’s relationship with Russia, continued at Kensington and the address of his luxury apartment and Hyde Park.
The group also planned a false flag protest outside the Kazakh embassy in Paul Mall.
In late 2022, dzhambazov and Ivanova traveled to Patchbarak, a US military base in Stuttgart. There, Marsalek believed that Ukrainian forces were trained to use ground aviation weapons, the court heard.
Dzhambazov and Ivanova recorded images and videos of the boundaries and security setup of the compound. Roussev and Marsalek discussed it using the “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 spied on Russian opposition Kiril Kachule, who was designated as a foreign agent by Russia in 2023, towards Budova, the town of Adriatic Resort in Montenegro.
After renting a villa adjacent to the property owned by a woman they believed to be Kachule’s girlfriend, the group recorded images of her using drones and other spyware to find him.
During the prosecution period, carried out between mid-2020 and early 2023, the group had access to 221 different mobile phones, 258 hard drives, 33 audio recorders, 55 video recorders and almost 500 SIM cards.
Members of the ring had 11 drones with 55 different names, 16 radios, 75 passports and identification documents. They also gathered a swarm of everyday objects that have been modified to hide surveillance devices such as rocks, pens, soft drink bottles, clocks, and two “spy ties.”
Each of the defendants claimed that they had been misled by Rusev and dzhambazov. Ivanova, the latter partner of 10 years, said he believes he is contributing to Belling Cat-style websites to expose corrupt journalists.
Gaberova, who had an 18-month simultaneous relationship with dzhambazov, and Ivanchev, Gaberova’s former boyfriend, said he believes Dzhambazov is supporting Interpol, who he claims to be working incorrectly.
Frank Ferguson, director of the Crown Prosecutor’s Office’s special crimes and counterterrorism division, said on Friday that by targeting journalists opposed to the Russian regime, the group “harms the message that the UK is a safe country for its people.”
“This long-term activity also undermined the security and security of the UK, and there is no doubt that each of the defendants knew exactly who they were spying on,” he added.
