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Three men have been found guilty of carrying out an arson attack on a warehouse in east London, which prosecutors said was orchestrated by individuals linked to Russia’s paramilitary Wagner group.
The verdicts were delivered by a jury at London’s Old Bailey on Tuesday. The jurors found Nii Kojo Mensah, 23, Jakeem Rose, 23, and Ugnius Asmena, 20, guilty of aggravated arson. Paul English, 61, was cleared of the same charge.
The attack in March 2024 targeted the warehouse units of Oddisey, a company that has been shipping humanitarian aid and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite technology to Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.
Dmitrijus Paulauskas, 23, was cleared of two counts of failing to disclose information about terrorist acts.
Ashton Evans, 20, from Newport, Gwent, was cleared of one count of failing to disclose information about terrorist acts but convicted of a second count. This was in relation to a separate unrealised plot targeting the Hedonism wine shop and Hide restaurant in Mayfair, belonging to a prominent Russian dissident Evgeny Chichvarkin.
Prosecutors have since the start of the case alleged the attacks were ordered by people linked to the paramilitary Wagner group, who reached the defendants through a shadowy network of chat forums on Russian social network Telegram. Moscow’s proxy military force is banned in Britain as a terrorist organisation.
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.
In Telegram messages shown to the jury, Earl is shown talking to a user under the handle Privet Bot — in a online account that has long been suspected of recruiting people for sabotage and arson operations in the UK and the EU.
“I know I can be the best spy you have ever seen but we need more communication and faster work with contracts. Everything you want in my country I will do immediately,” he said in a message dated April 9, 2024.
Between 2023 and 2024, advertisements for Privet Bot appeared at least eight times on Grey Zone, the largest pro-Russian Telegram channel associated with the mercenary group, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global network of investigative journalists.
David Cawthorne, unit head from the Crown Prosecution Service’s Counter Terrorism Division, said it was “clear that this was a targeted attack given the connection the warehouse had to Ukraine in shipping aid and other goods”.
The arson was carried out “on behalf of the Wagner Group, a private military contractor intimately connected to the Russian state”, he added.
Another man involved in the operation, Jake Reeves, 24, last year pleaded guilty to accepting payment from a foreign intelligence service.
A separate message thread between Reeves and Paulauskas, seen by the court, said that one of the defendants did not receive the payment he was promised for carrying out the arson attack, because he “didn’t do it to Wagner standards”.
“Holy fuck so Wagner literally has UK gangs doing their work . . . they are literally changing world history,” said Paulauskas.
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