Men accused of being approached by Russian contact to attack Starmer-linked assets in London

LONDON (AP) — A British prosecutor told a court on Wednesday that three men were offered payment by a Russian-speaking contact online to set fire last year to two houses and a car linked to U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson told the court that the men — Ukrainian nationals Roman Lavrynovych, 22, and Petro Pochynok, 35; and Stanislav Carpiuc, a 27-year-old Romanian citizen — were involved in setting the blazes in London between May 8 and 12.

They are accused of conspiracy to commit arson, but Atkinson said that Lavrynovych was identified by police as the man behind all the fires. He’s also charged with damaging two properties by fire with intent to endanger life or being reckless as to whether life was endangered.

The men deny the charges against them. The court wasn’t told how much money was offered or if anyone was injured in the house fires.

“Three fires in the same area within five days would be pretty unusual. However, three fires all involving property linked to the same person were beyond a coincidence,” Atkinson said.

Atkinson said that a Toyota car was deliberately set ablaze in the early hours of May 8 in the Kentish Town area of north London, followed by a house on May 11 and a second house on May 12.

The property fires were started with similar materials and “were set in the dead of night, when the occupants of the addresses would inevitably have been asleep,” he said, arguing that the men who set the fires must have intended to endanger the lives of the people inside.

The car, he said, had once belonged to Starmer, the first house on Ellington Road was managed by a company where the prime minister had once been a director and shareholder, and the second house on Countess Road was occupied by his sister-in-law and still owned by Starmer.

The attacks against the car and houses were “planned and directed, with those involved promised payment for their participation,” Atkinson told the court. Lavrynovych was offered payment to set the fires on the messaging app Telegram by a contact using the name “El Money,” Atkinson said.

In both cases, the occupants of the houses woke up because of the fires, Atkinson said.

On May 11, the occupant of the top floor apartment in the house, which had been turned into separate dwellings, was awakened by the smell of smoke at around 3 a.m., Atkinson said. The resident opened the front door and found the communal hallways full of smoke, had trouble breathing and retreated to the roof for safety, the prosecutor said.

A day later, the prime minister’s sister-in-law heard loud bangs and saw that billowing smoke was coming through the front door and filling the stairs at around 1 a.m., Atkinson told the court. She also struggled to breathe and her 9-year-old daughter was “very frightened,” he said.

Atkinson told the jury that it didn’t need to decide what motivated the defendants to carry out the alleged attacks and that it “does not matter whether they knew that the property they were targeting was connected to the prime minister or whether that formed part of their motivation.”

The court heard how more than 320 messages dating back to September 2024 were recovered between Lavrynovych and “El Money,” but Atkinson told the jury that they were not to concern themselves with who “El Money” was and why they decided to recruit people for attacks.