Espionage for Russians?

Risk of committing the crime! Pre-trial detention requested for BVB agent

Targeted: former chief inspector and police attaché Egisto Ott with his apparently good connections to Moscow

(Bild: stock.adobe.com, youtube.com, Krone KREATIV)

On Sunday, the Vienna public prosecutor's office applied for pre-trial detention against the suspected Russian agent Egisto Ott and his ex-son-in-law, as confirmed to the "Krone" newspaper. Accordingly, there is an urgent danger of committing the crime and a risk of concealment.

The Vienna Public Prosecutor's Office will submit corresponding applications against Egisto Ott and his ex-son-in-law to the Regional Court for Criminal Matters later today. A decision on these must then be made within 48 hours.

Cell phone contents handed over to Russians?
Ott has been under investigation by the Vienna prosecution authorities since 2017 for abuse of office, secret intelligence to the detriment of Austria and violation of official secrecy, among other things. The arrest was preceded by recent information that Ott had handed over the cell phone contents of top officials to Russian spies.

His ex-son-in-law, who is believed to have contributed to the crime, was also arrested. According to Bussek, both were taken to the Josefstadt prison on Saturday evening after their police questioning on the charges against them.

Ott may have obtained explosive information at the now disbanded BVT - which he may have passed on to Russia.

(Bild: Tomschi Peter)

Parties blame each other
Meanwhile, the parties continue to try to shift political responsibility for the alleged espionage case onto each other. ÖVP Secretary General Christian Stocker wants to deal with this in the committee of inquiry into the "red-blue abuse of power" and therefore extend it by adding more days of questioning. Among other things, former FPÖ mandatary Hans-Jörg Jenewein is to be summoned because he chatted extensively with Ott during the BVT-U committee, for example.

FPÖ sees ÖVP as "emphatically Russia-friendly"
FPÖ Secretary General Christian Hafenecker rejected this: "On the very first day, the ÖVP was informed by the trial judge that the alleged Russian influence is not a topic of the sub-committee," Hafenecker said in a press release. Furthermore, the "espionage scandal has its roots in the ÖVP-led Ministry of the Interior since the era of Ernst Strasser, starting in 2000". Since the former ÖVP Minister of the Interior, this has been "emphatically Russia-friendly".

Ott was arrested in Carinthia, his ex-son-in-law in Vienna. House searches were also carried out at the addresses of both of them.

Links to Jan Marsalek
Ott was an employee of the now dissolved Federal Office for State Protection and Counterterrorism (BVT). Most recently, he made the headlines in connection with the fugitive ex-Wirecard board member Jan Marsalek, whom he is said to have helped set up an espionage cell for Russia within the BVT.

Ott - together with former BVT department head Martin Weiss - is said to have procured information for Marsalek and Russia, drawing on his previous activities as a constitutional protector and police attaché. According to the German news magazine "Spiegel", the information concerned journalists living in Europe and a Kazakh opposition politician.

Information from the UK led to the arrest
Information from the UK that Ott had transmitted the mirrored content of the smartphones of three (former) top officials from the Ministry of the Interior to Russian intelligence services - presumably the FSB domestic intelligence service - in the summer of 2022 led to the arrest.

The stolen smartphones are said to be the devices of Michael Kloibmüller, who was Head of Cabinet at the Ministry of the Interior for many years, the current Federal Police Director Michael Takacs and Gernot Maier, Director of the Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum. Ott is presumed innocent.

Explosive information on "dumped" cell phones
The three cell phones were "victims" of an accident in 2017. A canoe capsized during a trip by the Ministry of the Interior and the smartphones fell into the water. As a result, an IT technician from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was asked to repair the service cell phones. He apparently made copies of the devices and passed them on to Ott and others.

Chats from Kloibmüller's smartphone were also passed on to the public prosecutor's office and the media. They led to investigations into Kloibmüller and former Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka on suspicion of corruption, although the case against the latter has already been dropped.