Public administration official at Warsaw City Hall has been charged with spying for Russia after allegedly passing swathes of official data to a handler from Moscow’s intelligence services over a five-year period.
The suspect was placed in pre-trial detention. Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images
Poland arrests suspected foreign intelligence officer in spy probe
The leaked documents enabled Russian agencies to build fake identities for other spies, prosecutors claimed, saying the suspect—named under privacy laws as Tomasz —had been previously trained by Russia.
Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW) announced on Thursday that the accused, who was arrested in March 2022, has now been indicted on charges of espionage and exceeding the powers of a public official.
Tomasz L. has been kept in temporary detention since his arrest as officials undertook a “lengthy” and “multi-threaded” investigation. Prosecutors working on the classified case say they finally sent an indictment to Warsaw’s regional court on 11 September this year.
What did he allegedly do?
Tomasz L. is accused of passing official documents and materials to the Russia’s civil intelligence service between 2017 and March 2022, taking advantage of his position as an employee in the archive department of the Polish capital’s registry office.
He is said to have had access to information in the office’s own archives as well as other stores of historical information linked to Warsaw city authorities.
“The evidence shows that Tomasz L. (…) copied official documents onto private data storage devices and took photographs of them with his phone, including entries regarding the civil status of Polish citizens and foreigners, correspondence with diplomatic missions, official templates, guidelines and other data,” the National Prosecutor’s Office said on Tuesday.
“He then transmitted this data to an established intelligence officer using secret radio communication. He had been previously trained in this area by the Russian services,” they added.
