Two men guilty of plotting to damage property linked to Sir Keir Starmer

Two stooges for a Russian-speaking taskmaster have been found guilty over a series of arson attacks on property linked to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

Last May, a Toyota Rav4, which was once owned by Starmer, was set alight in a street in Kentish Town, north London.

Days later, two houses were set ablaze, including a north London home occupied by the Prime Minister’s sister-in-law and her family, which he still owns.

The attacks in the middle of the night while people were in bed asleep posed a serious threat to life and left householders terrified, the Old Bailey heard.

Ukrainian Roman Lavrynovych, 22, and Romanian Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, were found guilty of plotting to damage property after a jury deliberated for seven-and-a-half hours.

Co-defendant Petro Pochynok, 35, was cleared of the same charge.

The court heard that Pochynok was recruited by Carpiuc to help Lavrynovych with the first fire.

His former housemate, Mr Pochynok, who was working in construction and as a Harrods delivery driver, told jurors that he did not know about the car arson plan until it was too late.

Mr Pochynok, of Islington, north London, said he thought Lavrynovych wanted him to help a mutual friend with heavy suitcases and had run away when he handed him a camera phone to film.

Jurors were shown a video shot by Lavrynovych of a lit match being thrown onto accelerant on the doorstep of the address.

Lavrynovych, of Sydenham, south London, was charged on May 15 last year. Two days later, Carpiuc was stopped at Luton Airport as he waited for a flight to Romania.

Police arrested the defendants within a week of the attacks ordered by a shadowy Telegram contact called El Money.

Lavrynovych admitted setting fire to the property but claimed he had been threatened by El Money.

The anonymous Russian speaker had offered Lavrynovych £3,000 in cryptocurrency if the blazes were filmed and got on the news.

The true identity of El Money remains a mystery, but Lavrynovych said he believed him to be ‘powerful’ with political connections.

Previously, El Money had tasked him to paint racist graffiti on an Islamic community centre and post anti-Muslim fliers around for money.

Commander Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, said there was nothing to indicate El Money was a threat to the state.

The motivation behind the attacks had been to ’cause concern’ and ‘disruption’ in the community within the UK and ‘fear’ for the Prime Minister, she said.

She said: ‘I think the intentions of the defendants were clearly to take payment, and to carry out a crime for money. There was no ideological motivation around that, and there’s no evidence to suggest that they knew who they were targeting, and that that was the Prime Minister or properties linked to the Prime Minister.’

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