Three Bulgarians have been found guilty of spying for Russia in Britain and across continental Europe as part of one of the largest Russian espionage rings ever uncovered by the British police.
During a three-year period, the group, led by a Bulgarian I.T. specialist, Orlin Roussev, 47, conducted six operations targeting journalists and critics of the Russian government, prosecutors said, adding they also carried out surveillance at a U.S. military site in Germany, where they believed Ukrainian soldiers were being trained.
“This case is a clear example of the increasing amount of state threat casework we are dealing with in the U.K. — particularly linked to Russia,” said Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command. “It also highlights a relatively new phenomenon whereby espionage is being ‘outsourced’ by certain states.”
Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, all from London, were found guilty by a jury on Friday of being part of a group of six Bulgarians who spied for Russia between 2020 and 2023.
The three had denied the charges against them, claiming that they did not know who they were working for or had been lied to by those higher up the chain. Before the trial began, Mr. Roussev, who had been living in Great Yarmouth, had pleaded guilty to spying charges, along with two other members of the group: Bizer Dzhambazov, 43, from London, and Ivan Stoyanov, 34. The group will be sentenced in May.
Commander Murphy said that the convictions were achieved “as the result of an extremely complex investigation into a group that was carrying out sophisticated surveillance operations in the U.K., and in Europe, on behalf of the Russian state.”
The court heard that the man at the heart of the conspiracy, Mr. Roussev, took orders from Jan Marsalek, an Austrian who, in turn, was identified as working for the Russian intelligence services.
Mr. Marsalek is the former chief operating officer of the German payments company Wirecard, which collapsed in 2020 with debts of more than 3 billion euros ($3.25 billion.) He and Mr. Roussev, who was at one point the chief technology officer of a financial firm in London, were believed to have first met a decade ago.
The unlikely heart of the spy ring was a 33-room former seaside hotel in Great Yarmouth, on England’s east coast, that was owned by Mr. Roussev. When it was raided by the police, they discovered sophisticated espionage equipment including listening devices, drones, cellphones, concealed cameras and a fake ID card printer. “Spy eyeglasses” were used to film at least one subject under surveillance.
Detectives sifted through more than 200,000 messages and seized hundreds of items after a coordinated series of raids and arrests in February 2023.
The evidence uncovered led prosecutors to accuse the spy ring of undertaking surveillance in 2022 at Patch Barracks, a U.S. military garrison near Stuttgart, Germany.
The group was also said to have targeted two investigative journalists, Christo Grozev and Roman Dobrokhotov.
In a conversation on Telegram, the ringleaders discussed robbing and killing Mr. Grozev, a Bellingcat journalist, or kidnapping him and taking him to Russia, prosecutors said.
Another operation focused on a former senior politician from Kazakhstan who was granted asylum in Britain after fleeing his home country.
The group was also said to have planned a fake protest at Kazakhstan’s embassy in London, hoping that, by providing intelligence about it to the Kazakh government, they could help the Russian state gain favor with Kazakhstan.
Surveillance operations extended as far as Montenegro to cover a man designated as a “foreign agent” by Russia.