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Criminal espionage case opened in LPR against OSCE employee

According to the ministry, David Orrells was the head of the technical monitoring group, an unmanned aerial vehicle operator and image analyst and acted on instructions from special services of a NATO country

LUGANSK, January 13. /TASS/. The state security ministry of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) said on Friday that it has opened a criminal case against an OSCE mission employee on espionage charges.

"The LPR state security ministry opened a criminal case against an employee of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on charges under article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code (espionage). <…> It has been established that OSCE employee David Orrells, a British national, <…> collected and transmitted information received during aerial surveys with the use of OSCE unmanned aerial vehicles about the positions and places of deployment of military hardware and weapons of the LPR People’s Militia, as well as coordinates of civil infrastructure facilities," it said.

According to the ministry, Orrells was the head of the technical monitoring group, an unmanned aerial vehicle operator and image analyst and acted on instructions from special services of a NATO country. The data collected by him was shared with Kiev and later used to shell the LPR territory.

The ministry said that in 2022 it had documented cases of reconnaissance activities conducted by OSCE employees. "It was established that for quite a long time several members of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission had been collecting classified military and socio-political information in the LPR at the request of a foreign intelligence service and had been acting in its interests. Criminal cases were opened and several convictions were made," the ministry said.