A Bulgarian espionage ring working on behalf of Russia in the UK used video-recording spyglasses and honey traps to gather information on journalists and dissidents, British prosecutors said on Monday.
The allegations came in the case of five Bulgarian nationals who are accused of spying in Britain as part of a ring co-ordinated by Jan Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of Wirecard.
London’s Old Bailey heard the group targeted journalists Christo Grozev and Roman Dobrokhotov, as well as Kazakh dissident Bergey Ryskaliyev, tracking them variously on flights and across European cities during 2021 and 2022.
One member of the group, Katrin Ivanova, 33, used specially-designed glasses to record images and videos to watch Grozev on a flight from Vienna to Montenegro in June 2022, prosecutor Alison Morgan KC said.
The group had accessed an airline industry database called “Amadeus” through another Bulgarian contact to ascertain the flight details and seat numbers of their targets, the court heard.
Ivanova also sat nearby Dobrokhotov on a flight in November 2021 and memorised his phone pin code, reporting it back to her handlers, Morgan added.
“That was a correct capture and showed the tradecraft of Miss Ivanova,” Morgan told the court.
The group also discussed bribing hotel staff, employing pickpockets and infiltrating a target’s home by hiring Bulgarian and Romanian cleaning teams, the court heard.
Prosecutors have named the members of the alleged spy ring as Orlin Roussev, 46, Biser Dzhambazov, 43, Vanya Gaberova, 30, Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, as well as Ivanova.
Roussev and Dzhambazov have already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to spy. The other three have denied the same charges, with Ivanova also denying a charge of possessing false identify documents.
Roussev was the ringleader of the group and reported directly to Marsalek, prosecutors have said.
In September 2021, Roussev and Marsalek, who was operating under the alias “Rupert Ticz”, co-ordinated surveillance on the journalist Grozev while he was attending a conference for his employer, Bellingcat, in Valencia, according to the prosecution.
The court was shown Telegram messages in which the two men discussed concocting a fake romance between Grozev and Gaberova. Gaberova added Grozev on Facebook and they exchanged likes on each other’s pictures, the court heard.
In the messages, Marsalek expressed fears that Gaberova would “fall in love” with her target, claiming he had “had that problem before with a honeytrap”.
Later, in a separate exchange, Marsalek also discussed with Roussev attempting to kidnap Dobrokhotov, according to the messages.
At one point he told Roussev that “a successful operation on British ground would be amazing after the fucked up Skripal stuff”, a reference to the botched poisoning attempt of former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2018 with the nerve agent novichok.
The trial continues.
