Intelligence officer accused of helping Russia hunt down opponents sentenced in Austria's biggest spying scandal in years
An Austrian court on Wednesday sentenced former domestic intelligence officer Egisto Ott to prison for helping Russia hunt down its opponents and selling him laptops and state phones at the request of Jan Marsalek, an alleged wanted Moscow agent, Reuters wrote.
Ott's case is the biggest spy scandal to hit Austria since 2020, when a retired army colonel was convicted of spying for Russia for decades.
In addition to spying against Austria, a crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison, Ott was found guilty of abuse of office, bribery and breach of trust.
Ott, 63, has pleaded not guilty and has maintained his innocence since the trial began in January. He was sentenced to four years and one month in prison.
Details from the file of the former Austrian officer
The case provided an insight into Russian intelligence work in Europe and the alleged operations of Jan Marsalek, after a London court last year convicted three Bulgarians of being part of a Russian spy ring run by him.
Fugitive Jan Marsalek, former director of bankrupt Wirecard, is wanted and believed to be in Russia.
The court concluded that Ott conducted unauthorized searches of police and other databases in an attempt to locate people Moscow wanted to hunt, such as Dmitri Senin, a former Russian intelligence agent who has now sought asylum in Montenegro.
Ott admitted that he saved the results to his private Gmail account or to unrelated files at the agency he worked for, the now-defunct Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Combating Terrorism.
Another target was Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, who worked for the investigative publication Bellingcat and led the reporting on the 2018 poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain, which London blames on Moscow. The Russians deny involvement.
According to Austrian prosecutors, Ott provided Marsalek with Grozev's address in Vienna, and Marsalek arranged a break-in. When he learned he was a target, Grozev moved from Austria.
Among other things, the court found that Ott gave an accomplice of Marsalek a SINA-S laptop, which includes hardware used by EU governments for secure communications, in exchange for €20,000.
