site.btaUPDATED Spying Charges Re-Submitted in Court against Group of Six, Including Military Intelligence Officers and Defence Ministry Directorate Head

The Sofia Military District Prosecution Office has submitted again to the Sofia Military Court spying charges against a group of six, including a ranking officer in the military intelligence (as leader), two more military intelligence officers, the head of a directorate at the Defence Ministry and a senior Parliament staffer, said the Prosecution Service Wednesday. 

The group was led by Ivan Iliev, a former head of the Defence Ministry's Military Intelligence Service, and also included his wife who has Bulgarian and Russian citizenship. They were exposed in 2021 and the indictment was submitted to court later the same year but was returned to the prosecutors after the court found in it substantial flaws. 

The six are charged with organizing and/or leading a spy ring, collecting state secrets and divulging them to "a foreign country" (apparently, Russia), and placing themselves in the service of that country to work for it as spies. Three of the suspects divulged foreign classified information of military nature. According to the prosecution, Iliev spent years recruiting holders of key posts with unlimited access to classified information of Bulgaria, NATO and the EU. The members of the group used their respective offices to gather classified, confidential and other essential information which was of interest to the foreign country's intelligence services. They passed the information to Iliev for payment, and then Iliev and his wife passed it on to an employee at the Russian Embassy in Sofia.