By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) -The ringleader of an arson attack on Ukraine-linked businesses in London last year discussed kidnapping the co-founder of finance app Revolut and torching a warehouse in the Czech Republic with his Russian handler, a British court heard on Thursday.
Dylan Earl, 21, who admitted aggravated arson over the 2024 blaze which targeted companies delivering satellite equipment from Elon Musk's Starlink to Ukraine, had also sought to pay a serving British soldier for intelligence, prosecutors said.
Earl and five others are due to be sentenced on Friday after being convicted for their part in a plot to burn down warehouses on an industrial estate in east London on behalf of Russia's Wagner mercenary group.
The prosecution outlined the other incidents to the court at London's Old Bailey on Thursday to build its case for a long sentence for the arson attack and Earl's acknowledged part in a conspiracy to kidnap the wealthy owner of a restaurant, a high-profile critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
WIKIPEDIA ENTRIES AND EMOJIS
On the day he was arrested in April 2024, Earl communicated on Telegram with someone prosecutors said was a Wagner handler known as 'Lucky Strike', about the kidnap and extortion of Revolut's Russian-born billionaire boss Nikolay Storonsky.
"Can you catch somebody and get him to transfer money to your accounts," Lucky Strike wrote on Telegram before attaching the Wikipedia entry for Storonsky, who co-founded Revolut in 2015.
"He is a billionaire so he will have a lot of security and systems to protect unauthorised payments," Earl replied. "But I will research more into this and see if it's possible."
In another exchange, Earl discussed burning down a warehouse in the Czech Republic for 35,000 pounds ($47,000) and sought to recruit someone living in Slovakia to do it, prosecutor Duncan Penny told the court.
"A warehouse needs to be (fire emoji)," Earl wrote. Asked about the size, he says: "It's big."
The court was also shown messages from Earl to a serving British soldier, offering to pay him for "intelligence".
The soldier, who said he had been in the British military for six years, said he could get information not only from his squadron "but I have mates in the SAS", a reference to the Special Air Service, the army's special forces regiment.
"Overall, Earl's actions constitute a sustained campaign of terrorism and sabotage on UK soil, carried out in support of a foreign power - the Russian Federation - and its war of aggression against Ukraine," Penny said.
Earl's lawyer Paul Hynes told the court Earl was a "sad individual" and a 'Walter Mitty' character, and that he had been groomed by "sophisticated" Wagner handlers.
The Kremlin has denied the accusations, and its embassy in London has rejected any part in the warehouse fires, which Penny said appeared to be part of a series of European-wide sabotage operations.
Citing a British counter-terrorism police officer, he said 10 days after the London fire, warehouses belonging to the same company were set ablaze on an industrial estate in Madrid, which "strongly suggests" the incidents were linked.
Britain has repeatedly accused Moscow of orchestrating malign activity in Britain, with a group of Bulgarians convicted in March of spying on behalf of Russian intelligence.
On Thursday, police said they had arrested three men suspected of assisting Russia's intelligence service and warned the public against what it said was a growing campaign by foreign intelligence services to recruit 'proxies' in Britain.
($1 = 0.7451 pounds)
(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
