Love affair to staged arrest: how a Romanian from England was jailed in Russia as a spy
Springtime in a park.Grey sky.
A young man in a blue knitted hat and Adidas backpack walks down a path.Two burly security agents spring from a van and pin him to the pavement.“What is your name?” asks a voice in English as a gloved hand holds the man’s face towards the camera.“David Adrian Kercso,” he swiftly responds.
Where is he from? “Romania.Romania.”The video, released by Russia’s FSB security service and published by state media, purports to show the arrest of Kercso, now 23, a Romanian citizen who grew up in England and was sentenced earlier this year to 15 years for spying for Ukraine.Reuters has not been able to verify all of the evidence in Kercso’s case.
But what is clear is that the arrest video is not what it purports to be: Reuters analysis of the video and of court records of his detention shows that at the time it was made he had already been in Russian custody for months.It was filmed in a park inside Russia, in the southern city of Sochi.But Kercso’s arrest was first announced elsewhere, by pro-Russian separatists across the border in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of neighboring Georgia, who released their own video of him in their custody the day before he first turned up in a Russian court.The FSB did not respond to requests for comment for this story, including why it would release a video depicting the purported arrest of a suspect who was already in custody.Requests for comment were also sent to the Abkhazian separatists’ SGB security agency, the Russian embassy in London, the Romanian and Ukrainian foreign ministries.
None replied.To Kercso’s family, who say he was lured to the Black Sea coast to pursue a romance with a woman he had met online, the FSB video of a staged arrest is just another bizarre turn in a story that alarmed them from the outset.He hopes to lodge an appeal against his conviction.“I told him to not go there because it’s very dangerous, because it’s a war,” his mother Ju...