Romanian man arrested in UK on suspicion of aiding Russian sabotage campaign

British police on Wednesday announced that a 38-year-old Romanian man has been arrested on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service.

The man, whose name has not been released, was identified as part of an investigation into a fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham.

He was arrested on March 19 after arriving at Stansted Airport, according to London’s Metropolitan Police, under a section of the National Security Act 2023 that targets individuals who attempt to assist foreign intelligence services.

The blaze at the DHL hub in Birmingham last July was caused by a device that is believed to have been delivered to the warehouse by air, as reported by The Guardian.

Another incendiary device affecting the DHL logistics chain in July 2024 is suspected at a blaze in Leipzig, Germany, where the device could have caused a plane crash according to the German security services, if it had detonated while aboard the flight. This package was also bound for the United Kingdom.

A third incident also took place in July near Warsaw, the capital of Poland. As reported by Reuters, the attempts are believed to be a “dry run” for a future plot in which Russia detonated incendiary devices in midair on transatlantic cargo flights to the United States and Canada.

The devices were reportedly disguised as massage machines from Lithuania that contained a magnesium-based substance which could have burned so destructively on board an in-flight plane that the aircraft would have crashed.

In November, Kęstutis Budrys, the chief national security adviser to Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda, blamed Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, for the plots. Other Western security officials have agreed with this assessment, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

That allegation came as the Polish National Prosecutor’s Office confirmed the arrests in July of four people over parcels containing concealed explosives which it said were believed to be test runs before an attack on flights bound for the United States and Canada. Another man, who is suspected of posting the parcels in Lithuania, was arrested in September.

The arrest was announced amid growing alarm across Europe over Russian-directed sabotage operations, with security agencies and governments increasingly warning about the threat posed by saboteurs.

Earlier this year, the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s political executive, announced that allies were “deeply concerned about recent malign activities on Allied territory, including those resulting in the investigation and charging of multiple individuals in connection with hostile state activity.”