A sixth Bulgarian citizen has been charged in Britain with allegedly being a member of a Russian spy network operating in the United Kingdom, British prosecutors said.
The man, identified in the statement as 38-year-old Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev, was arrested on February 7 as part of an ongoing counterterrorism investigation, Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
Ivanchev, a resident of west London, will be charged with "conspiracy to obtain, collect, record, publish, or transmit documents or information" that could be useful for purposes detrimental to the security and interests of the British state.
Five other Bulgarians who lived in London and Norfolk -- Orlin Rusev, 46, Bizer Dzhambazov, 42, Katrin Ivanova and Ivan Stoyanov, both 32, and Vanya Gaberova, 29 -- were arrested in September last year on similar charges of “conspiring to collect information intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy,” namely Russia.
All six are accused of being part of an alleged Russian spy network that operated in Britain from August 2020 to February 2023 and are due in court in October. The trial is estimated to last four months.
British authorities said Ivanchev and the other five conspired with Austrian citizen Jan Marsalek and other unknown persons.
Marsalek is a fugitive businessman who was chief operating officer of German payment processing company Wirecard, which became insolvent and collapsed in 2020 in a fraud scandal.
Marsalek, who has not been charged in the case, has been on the run and is believed to be in Russia.
Three members of the group -- Rusev, Dzhambazov, and Ivanova -- have also been accused of possessing false documents which, according to the BBC, are passports and identity cards from Britain, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Spain, Croatia, Slovenia, Greece, and the Czech Republic.
