“Let’s hire an ISIS suicide bomber to blow him up in the street!”: Europe’s most wanted man plotted my murder — and that of my colleague

A jury at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, has just found six of my compatriots — citizens of Bulgaria — guilty of conspiring with the Kremlin to kidnap and possibly murder me and my colleague and friend, Roman Dobrokhotov. The Bulgarians, the jury acknowledged, had been recruited and run by former Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek, who first came to my attention when I investigated his disappearance from Austria and subsequent re-emergence in Moscow in 2020. For years, while no one seemed to be watching, Marsalek had quietly siphoned off billions from the publicly traded German company where he worked as a top-level executive, leaving a gaping hole in its balance sheet. In parallel, he had equally quietly volunteered his services to Russian intelligence — including to the same FSB unit that Roman and I had proven was behind the August 2020 poisoning of Alexei Navalny.