British police said on Tuesday they had charged three Bulgarian nationals with identity document offences following a media report they were suspected of spying for Moscow.
The trio were among five people arrested in February for a suspected breach of the Official Secrets Act, according to a Metropolitan Police statement. The BBC had earlier reported they were suspected of working for the Russian security services.
The Met, which has a policing responsibility for espionage, declined to comment on whether any were suspected spies. “In relation to the Official Secrets Act investigation, all five individuals were later released on police bail and are due to return in September 2023 . . . Enquiries continue.”
The two men and one woman were subsequently charged with possessing false identity documents with “improper intention”.
A police statement named them as Orlin Roussev, 45, of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and Bizer Dzhambazov, 41, and Katrin Ivanova, 31, both of the same address in Harrow, north-west London.
They appeared at London’s Old Bailey court in July on the fake document charges and were remanded in custody until a future date.
The three named defendants have lived and worked in the UK for more than a decade, the BBC reported.
Roussev moved to the UK in 2009, according to the report, originally spending three years as a technician in the financial services industry.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he owns a business involved in signals intelligence, which involves the interception of communications or electronic signals. But according to company registration documents it was dissolved in November 2021.
Roussev also claimed on LinkedIn to have acted as an adviser to the Bulgarian Ministry of Energy.
The BBC reported that of the other two, Dzhambazov was a driver for hospitals, while Ivanova describes herself on her LinkedIn profile as a laboratory assistant for a private health business.
The pair also ran a community organisation providing services to Bulgarian people, including familiarising them with the “culture and norms of British society”, the BBC said.
Russian spies have been involved in several high-profile plots in Britain including the 2006 murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko and the attempted murder in 2018 of Russian defector Sergei Skripal.
All three of Russia’s spy agencies, including the Federal Security Service or FSB, which Vladimir Putin ran before he became prime minister and subsequently president, have been involved in UK operations. The other two services are Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, and the SVR foreign intelligence service.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to the expulsions across Europe of about 400 Russian diplomats for alleged spying. There have been other recent cases of western security services exposing so-called Russian sleeper agents or “illegals” working under deep cover. These include the arrest of a Brazilian university researcher last year in Norway on suspicion of spying for Moscow.
The UK, which has named Russia as the “most acute threat” to Britain’s national security, last month passed a new national security law that seeks to deter espionage and foreign interference with new tools and criminal provisions.