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Six Britons acting for Russia’s Wagner group have been jailed for setting fire to a London warehouse storing humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
Sentencing the men, a judge at the Old Bailey said they had planned a “campaign of terrorism and sabotage” in the interests of the Russian state.
Dylan Earl was handed 17 years and a further six years on extended licence for his “leading role”. Jake Reeves, from Croydon in south London, was given 12 years in prison with one year on extended licence. The offences they admitted made them the first to be convicted under the National Security Act 2023.
Jakeem Rose, 23 and also from Croydon, was jailed for eight years and 10 months. Nii Mensah, 23, from Thornton Heath, south London, was sentenced to nine years and 21-year-old Ugnius Asmena, who was homeless, was given seven years. The trio were each found guilty of aggravated arson and handed a further year on extended licence by the judge.
Ashton Evans, a 20-year-old drug dealer from Newport in Gwent, was jailed for nine years plus a further year on extended licence after being found guilty of failing to disclose information about terrorist acts relating to another plot in Mayfair.
The arson attack on a warehouse in Leyton, east London, put 60 firefighters at risk and caused £1m in damage in March last year.
The court heard that Earl, 21, and Reeves, 24, did not leave their bedrooms while organising the attack for the Wagner group, acting on behalf of the Russian Federation.
The group targeted the warehouse because it was being used to supply humanitarian aid and Starlink satellite equipment to Ukraine.
When the same Ukrainian company was hit by an arson attack 10 days later in Madrid, detectives from the Met’s counter-terrorism command took over the investigation.
When Earl was arrested, police analysis of his mobile phone revealed he had videos of the warehouse fire being started and was in contact with the Wagner group on Telegram, through an account with the usernames “Privet Bot” and “Lucky Strike”.
Some of the messages showed that reconnaissance for further “missions”, involving arson attacks at a restaurant and wine shop in Mayfair owned by the Russian dissident Evgeny Chichvarkin had already been carried out. The use of explosives to damage buildings was also discussed.
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Detectives discovered that Earl was also raising the possibility of kidnapping Chichvarkin and “exiling him back to Russia to face prison”. The drug dealer from Elmesthorpe in Leicestershire had discussed another potential attack in the Czech Republic.
In a search of his home, police found a Russian flag, more than £20,000 in cash and cocaine hydrochloride with a street value of about £34,000.
The court heard he was a member of numerous pro-Russian propaganda channels and was motivated by “simple and ugly greed”.
The judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, said: “This case is about the efforts of the Russian Federation to gain pernicious global influence using social media to enlist saboteurs vast distances from Moscow.”
She found the arson attack had a “terrorist connection” regardless of whether the perpetrators knew it. The Wagner group is proscribed by the UK government as a terrorist organisation.
