UK announces arrest of espionage suspect arrested in Cyprus last year

London’s metropolitan police on Friday announced the arrest of a 44-year-old man who was arrested in Cyprus last year, accused of having spied on both the British Royal Air Force’s base at Akrotiri and the National Guard’s Andreas Papandreou airbase in Paphos. The man, a dual British and Azerbaijani national, was initially arrested in June last year by the Republic of Cyprus’ authorities, with it widely understood that the intelligence which led to his arrest was sourced from the State of Israel. On the day of his arrest, Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar wrote in a post on social media that a planned attack on Israeli citizens by Iran’s Islamic revolutionary guard had been averted thanks to cooperation between the authorities of Cyprus and Israel. “The Islamic revolutionary guard– the terror arm of the Iranian regime – tried to carry out an attack on Israeli citizens in Cyprus. Thanks to the activity of the Cypriot security authorities, in cooperation with Israeli security services, the terror attack was thwarted. Israel thanks Cyprus for its swift and effective actions,” he wrote at the time. Additionally, in August last year, the man’s lawyer, Efstathios Efstathiou, had argued at the Supreme Court that the arrest of the man was illegal, saying that the “uncritical acceptance of undocumented and unverified information as a sufficient legal basis” for the warrants, constituted a “fundamental error” in the court of first instance, the Limassol district court. That information, he said, originated “from a third country outside the European Union”. “The dependence of an EU member state on information from a third country, the source of which is inaccessible, unverifiable, and not cross-referenced, is not permissible,” he argued. However, the court ruled that the man’s arrest and the subsequent search of his apartment were legal, stressing that the information received by the Cypriot authorities did not constitute “general and vague allegations”. “The information from the foreign country was confirmed following physical monitoring of the applicant over a specific period of time by the Republic of Cyprus’ authorities,” it added. The man as such remained in detention at the central prison. More recently, it was decided that he would instead be tried in the United Kingdom rather in Cyprus, with it having been reported that the majority of the intelligence he had gathered related to the Akrotiri base rather than that in Paphos. As such, he was re-arrested on July 17 this year, so as to allow extradition proceedings to be initiated. The metropolitan police on Friday disclosed that the man had been involved in “incidents” at the Akrotiri base between May 11 and June 22 last year, and that “he allegedly conducted hostile surveillance on the base, a prohibited place, and is alleged to have then shared information with the Islamic revolutionary guards” of Iran. It also disclosed that he now faces charges related to sections 3 and 4 of the UK’s national security act, passed under the administration of Rishi Sunak, which carry a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. London counter-terrorism police commander Helen Flanagan said of the case that it “shows we are able to use the national security act overseas when British military bases are allegedly targeted by hostile state activity”. “A huge amount of partnership work has been carried out between British and Cypriot law enforcement agencies,” she added.