A woman accused of spying for Moscow told the Old Bailey she believed she was working for Interpol after a man showed her a fake ID and told her he could enrol her at “police school in Wembley”.
On her first day of giving evidence, London-based Vanya Gaberova, a 30-year-old beautician, said she did not question Bizer Dzhambazov, 43, who also told her that untrained people like her were better at surveillance because they did not stand out in a crowd.
Gaberova said she and Dzhambazov became close in August 2021 and gradually started a relationship as he began to give her surveillance tasks around Europe, which prosecutors say were for the benefit of Russia.
Dzhambazov, a medical courier, told her he was part of an Interpol economic crime unit and showed her credentials, which she did not question, and added that he could help her get a job in the police, which she said was an aspiration of hers.
“I told him my dream is to be police like him, and then he told me ‘you can be if you want’. He said he knew people who can help me,” she told the court. Dzhambazov said there was “a police university in Wembley” that he could get her into, though the court has heard his only academic connection was to organise council-funded English classes for Bulgarian migrants.
The fake identification had his face and a flag on it and, while other members of her family questioned whether he was a police officer, she said she never doubted it. “Even when I was arrested [in February 2023] I didn’t believe something was wrong,” she said.
Dzhambazov has already pleaded guilty to spying for Russia, carrying out surveillance tasks as part of a spy ring run by his friend Orlin Roussev, based in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Roussev, who has also admitted guilt, was accused of working for Jan Marsalek, an Austrian fugitive and Russian agent based in Moscow.
Gaberova said she was duped by a man who at one point claimed he had brain cancer, sending her a selfie of himself “with tissues around his head” after what he said was an operation.
Their relationship began after he took her on a trip to Valencia in September 2021, the court heard. Dzhambazov said he was surveilling the Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev, known for his exposures of Russian espionage, claiming he was corrupt.
Gaberova said that when Grozev arrived in the Spanish city by plane on 12 September 2021, Dzhambazov brought Gaberova to the airport car park and asked her to look out for him. She ended up following Grozev to his hotel in a taxi, passing on where he was staying, she told the court.
Asked if she thought it unusual to be asked to conduct surveillance without training, Gaberova said Dzhambazov had “an answer for everything”. She said he had told her it was normal for Interpol to have civilians following persons of interest “because sometimes police people you can recognise very well and normal people don’t act different”.
Gaberova told the court the two had begun a sexual relationship the previous night because he had told her that he would split from his long-term girlfriend, Katrin Ivanova, 33, the next morning. “I was OK with that because he was going to break up with her,” she said.
Ivanova, another defendant, gave evidence earlier this week to say her relationship with Dzhambazov continued for another year and a half until all three were arrested. Gaberova said she did not meet Ivanova until after their arrest, although prosecutors say the two women were involved in surveillance at different times.
The trial continues.
