Jury retires to consider verdict in Wagner Group arson case
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Jurors have retired to consider their verdicts in the trial of six men accused of taking part in an arson attack on a London business allegedly ordered by the Kremlin-backed Wagner mercenary group.
The fire, which tore through a warehouse in east London in March last year, destroyed the facilities of Oddisey — a company that shipped humanitarian aid and communications equipment, including Starlink satellite terminals, to Ukraine.
In summing up the case, Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said the instructions for the attack came through a Russian social media platform, Telegram, from a user under the handle Privet Bot. The account was believed to have links with Russian intelligence, the court heard.
Prosecutors at London’s Old Bailey have since the start of the trial in June alleged the attack was organised “at the behest of the Wagner group”, the Kremlin’s proxy military force banned in Britain as a terrorist organisation.
Two of the defendants, Dmitrijus Paulauskas, 23, and Ashton Evans, 20, are accused of failure to disclose information about terrorist acts, but their defence claimed they didn’t know who was behind the operation.
The remaining four — Paul English, 61, Nii Kojo Mensah, 23, Jakeem Rose, 23, and Ugnius Asmena, 20 — face charges of aggravated arson, which they have all denied. The trial is ongoing.
According to the prosecution, the plot was co-ordinated by Dylan Earl, 21, a British man who last year pleaded guilty to an offence under the UK’s new National Security Act, introduced to crack down on hostile activity by foreign states.
Another man involved in the operation, Jake Reeves, 24, pleaded guilty to accepting payment from a foreign intelligence service.
Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, has a long standing history of “recruiting low-level individuals to conduct sabotage operations in foreign countries in the event of war”, said Justice Cheema-Grubb.
“Our parents and grandparents would have had a simple term for what Earl and Reeves did — treason”, she added.
The arson attack in Leyton is alleged to have been one in a series of planned operations, including a separate plot targeting the high-end Hedonism wine shop and Hide restaurant in Mayfair, London, belonging to a prominent Russian dissident Evgeny Chichvarkin.
Prosecutors said that these were collectively worth more than £30mn at the time the plot took place.
The defence has argued that the men on trial were unaware of any geopolitical motivations behind the incident, suggesting they may have been misled by the organisers.
Defendants were caught on surveillance footage at the scene of the fire and exchanged incriminating messages before and after the incident.
“It would seem that this was a completely unprepared and somewhat ill-thought out mission,” Mensah’s defence lawyer Alan Kent KC, said in a closing statement. “This was not a professional job . . . but was in fact entirely amateur”.
