After the arrest of a former intelligence officer, Vienna says it must fight against Russian infiltration

According to the chancellor, the allegations against Egisto Otto, who worked for the now-defunct intelligence agency and whose arrest was announced on Friday, are serious and prompted a meeting of Austria’s national security council.

E. Ott himself denies having committed any crime.

“On the one hand, these charges must be examined by the courts. On the other hand, the security situation of the republic needs to be assessed and clarified, K. Nehammer’s statement says. “We must avoid the threat of Russian spy networks to our country by infiltrating or instrumentalizing political parties and networks.”

K. Nehammer said that he is calling a meeting of the National Security Council on April 9. The council, made up of government ministers and members of all political parties, is the main advisory group on security and defence.

On Monday, the Vienna Criminal Court approved a 14-day extension of Otto’s detention on the charges against him. Prosecutors in Vienna declined to give details of the espionage charges, but said they related to “abuse of official position” and were “harmful to Austria”.

The report of the Austrian daily newspaper “Der Standard” states that E. Ott is suspected of having transferred potentially sensitive data from the mobile phones of three former high-ranking officials of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior to the Russian authorities as early as 2022.

Those cellphones had to be repaired by IT specialists from Austria’s former domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Fight Against Terrorism, or BVT, when the devices fell into the water during a boat excursion on the Danube in 2017. However, the data they contained fell into Mr. Otto’s hands, and he allegedly passed them on to Russian security officials.

Mr Ott was arrested after UK authorities passed on information about his case to his Austrian counterparts, Der Standard reported.

Britain arrested five Bulgarian nationals last year, and another in February this year, and charged them with alleged involvement in a Russian spy ring that worked with the fugitive former German payment processing company Wirecard, which collapsed in 2020. ” by the activity manager Jan Marsalek, members.

Last month, Der Spiegel, German public broadcaster ZDF, Austrian newspaper Der Standard and Russian investigative platform The Insider jointly reported that Ott and another former Austrian intelligence officer were suspected of spying on potential targets in Europe and passing the information to J .Marsalek, who, according to them, has been in contact with Russian intelligence since at least 2014.

They also reported that Mr Ott and a colleague allegedly helped Mr Marsalek secretly flee Austria on a private jet in 2020 after the collapse of Wirecard.

In a recent interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, Ott dismissed the allegations as unfounded.

E. Ottas had received accusations before. In 2017, Western intelligence agencies warned Austrian colleagues about his possible spying for Russia. In the same year, E. Ott was suspended from work at BVT, and in 2021 he was briefly detained.

The six-page classified document, obtained in March by the Austrian weekly news magazine Der Falter, also provided more information about Russian infiltration of Austria’s political elite, particularly in 2017 and 2019, when the conservative People’s Party was in coalition with the far-right Freedom Party, which signed a cooperation agreement in 2016. agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.

Last month, Austria expelled two Russian diplomats from the Russian embassy in Vienna over what Austrian officials said was related to espionage.