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Three Bulgarians are found guilty of spying on Russia in the old Bailey in London.
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 been assigned the Bulgarian group duties on behalf of Russian military intelligence and the domestic intelligence reporting agency, was granting the allocation of the Bulgarian group.
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.
Dominique Murphy, director of Metropolitan Police’s SO15 counter-terrorism headquarters, said before the verdict that pursuing the spyring included one of the biggest spying activities he’d seen in more than 20 years of terrorism work.
“This was spying on a nearly industrial scale on behalf of the Russian state,” he told reporters, describing the group as a “serious threat.”
This is a developing story
