David Smith, a British embassy security guard accused of selling secrets to Russia was dumped by his Ukrainian wife just months before his arrest. Svetlana Makogonova is said to have walked out on David Smith in February after almost 20 years of marriage. This was reported by the Sun.
A family friend told the publication that everyone was shocked when she left because they were always so close.
“She was always by his side. She was a good wife, good for him,” a family friend said according to the Sun.
The pal said they met when Scots-born Smith, obsessed with Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, was an air steward in the 1990s.
David Smith has been arrested on suspicion of passing state secrets to Russia. Officials reckon he had worked for Vladimir Putin’s Russia since last November, claiming he got paid thousands of pound for passing them documents. It has emerged he came to the attention of spooks after paying for everything in cash. The probe is focused on “eavesdropping”.
David Smith was arrested at his home, a two-room flat on a tidy estate in the city of Potsdam, on Tuesday and the contents of his apartment are likely to become a focus of the ongoing inquiry into whether he sold documents to “a representative of a Russian intelligence service” in exchange for cash.
German police left his apartment unprotected, meaning members of the public could easily peer inside through half-drawn shutters.
Whether anything inside has any bearing on the investigation will be assessed by detectives, who will also want to look at the extent of the vetting process that led to him getting a job in the embassy, where he started work late last year.
Photographs published by numerous media organisations on Thursday showed Russian flags inside his flat and military memorabilia from east Ukraine. Other items included a mug bearing the flag of Novorossiya, a name adopted by the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Clearly visible was a framed insignia of Ukraine’s Berkut special police unit, which fought back protesters during the 2014 EuroMaidan protests and were lionised by opponents of the new Kyiv government.
A bookshelf held a partially obscured insignia of the so-called Somalia Battalion, a Russian-backed separatist military unit that fought against the Kyiv government and participated in the battle for Donetsk airport in 2014.
A sailor’s cap seen on a shelf is part of the uniform of the Black Sea Fleet, which is based in Sevastopol.
Under German law, Smith can be held in pre-trial detention while investigations into his actions are ongoing, and before he has been fully charged.
According to the Guardian, Smith worked in Berlin not as a private contractor but as a “local hire” who was directly employed by the British embassy.
While the embassy outsources some security work to Securitas and building management to CBRE, both companies have categorically denied that Smith is or was on their payroll. “The arrested person is not known to Securitas,” a spokesperson for the company told.