By Francois Murphy
VIENNA, May 20 (Reuters) – An Austrian court found former intelligence officer Egisto Ott guilty of spying on Wednesday, for helping Russia hunt down opponents and selling it state laptops and phones at the behest of suspected Moscow agent Jan Marsalek.
Ott’s is the biggest spying case in Austria since a retired army colonel was convicted in 2020 of having spied for Moscow for decades.
In addition to spying to the detriment of Austria, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, Ott was found guilty of offences including misuse of office, bribery and breach of trust.
Ott, 63, pleaded not guilty and has maintained his innocence since the trial opened in January. He was sentenced to four years and one month in prison.
Ott, wearing a dark suit and black shirt, did not react as the ruling was delivered. He felt “calm”, his lawyer Anna Mair told reporters afterwards, adding that he planned to appeal.
ALLEGED MOSCOW AGENT ON THE RUN
The proceedings offered a glimpse of Russian intelligence-gathering in Europe, and of Marsalek’s alleged operations across the continent, after a London court convicted three Bulgarians last year of being part of a Russian spy ring run by him.
Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of Wirecard, the collapsed German payments firm, is on the run and believed to be in Russia. As such, he could not be reached for comment.
Ott was found to have made unauthorised searches in police and other databases in an attempt to locate people Moscow wanted to hunt down, such as Dmitry Senin, a former Russian intelligence agent who has now claimed asylum in Montenegro.
Ott acknowledged saving the results in his private Gmail account or in unrelated case files of the agency he worked for, the now-defunct Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism.
Ott said he had been operating under the orders of a superior who had been contacted by an allied Western intelligence agency that had hoped to recruit Senin, but did not say which agency or which country it was from.
Another target was Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, who worked for investigative outlet Bellingcat and led its reporting on the 2018 poisoning in Britain of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, which Britain blames on Russia.
Moscow denies involvement in that case and has regularly accused Western powers of trying to inflame anti-Russian hysteria.
Prosecutors said Ott provided Grozev’s address in Vienna to Marsalek, who then arranged a break-in at the apartment. Grozev later moved away from Austria for security reasons when he learned he was a target.
Ott was found to have provided an accomplice of Marsalek’s with a SINA-S laptop, which includes hardware used by European Union governments for secure communications, in exchange for €20,000 ($23,200).
He also provided Marsalek’s network with three work phones belonging to members of the then-interior minister’s private office that were recovered after a boating accident in 2017, the court found.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Alex Richardson, Rod Nickel)
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