Three Bulgarian nationals based in the United Kingdom were condemned by a London jury of spying for Russia on what the police said they were “an industrial scale”.
The trio was accused of putting lives in danger while they followed orders in the name of Russian information to surveillance across Europe on Kremlin opponents, including journalists, diplomats and Ukrainian troops.
Friday, a jury of the former Bailey court revealed that Bulgarian nationals Katrin Ivanova, 43, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, guilty of spying for Russia on what the police said was “an industrial scale”.
The trio engaged in a series of surveillance and intelligence operations over three years during which one of their leaders nicknamed them “The Minions”, a reference to yellow acolytes in the film, Despicable Me, who works for Supervillain Gru.
Defenders – who worked for the Russian Intelligence Service GRU – risked up to 14 years in prison when sentenced in May with three other Bulgarian members of the same spy cell.
The trio chief, Orlin Roussev, 47, his assistant Biser Dzhambazov, 43, and the co-conspirator Ivan Stoyanov had all pleaded guilty of spying for Russia shortly before the trial.
Roussev received more than 200,000 euros ($ 217,000) to finance espionage activities.
The brain of the operation was the alleged Russian agent Jan Marsalek, 44, an Austrian businessman wanted by Interpol after the collapse of the German processing company Wirecard.
Marsalek, whose place where is current is unknown but would be in Russia, acted as an intermediary linking Russian information and the spying ring, asking them to carry out six serious operations in the United Kingdom, Austria, Spain, Germany and Montenegro until their arrest in 2023.
“This hoped on an almost industrial scale on behalf of Russia, the Russian State and the Russian intelligence services,” said Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the London police terrorism.
HQ ‘Indiana Jones’
British prosecutors said Marsalek had in charge of the British Bulgarian team for spying Ukrainian soldiers trained in an American base in Germany, in order to follow their movements on the battlefield after the invasion of Russia in 2022.
Another operation involved the espionage of Christo Grozev, a journalist with an investigation website Bellingcat, who directed a report on the 2018 poisoning of the double Russian agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, in order to remove or even kill him.
The group also targeted the British Russian Roman Dobrokhotov, editor-in-chief of the initiate, Bergey Ryskaliyev, a former Kazakh politician granted asylum in the United Kingdom and the Russian dissident Kiril Kachur.
They discussed dropping the blood of the false pigs on the Kazakhstan embassy in London by the drone as part of a false protest intended to win the favor of Kazakh spies.
The police found a treasure of what they called “really sophisticated” spy software during a raid on the Roussev operations center in a former guest house in the seaside city of Great Yarmouth, described in text messages like his “Indiana Jones garage”.
He included homemade audiovisual spy devices hidden inside everyday objects, including a rock, men’s links, a bottle of coke and a cuddly toy.
“Really sophisticated devices – the kind of thing you would really expect to see in a spy novel – were found here in Great Yarmouth and London,” Murphy said.
Love triangle
Dzhambazov, who worked for a medical messaging company but said he was an interpol police officer, was in contact with two other accused – his assistant partner of laboratory Ivanova and the esthetician Gaberova.
Gaberova, in turn, had abandoned the painter-decorator Ivanchev for Dzhambazov, who took her to Michelin star restaurants and stayed with her in a five-star hotel.
When the police moved in to arrest the suspects in February 2023, they found Dzhambazov in bed with Gaberova rather than home with Ivanova.
The two women said during the trial that they had been deceived and manipulated by Dzhambazov.
Judge Hilliard KC referred the defendants to detention until the conviction between May 7 and May 12.
