LONDON (Reuters) -The ringleader of an arson attack on Ukraine-linked businesses in London last year was on Friday jailed for 17 years for what prosecutors described as “a sustained campaign of terrorism and sabotage on UK soil”.
Dylan Earl, 21, admitted aggravated arson over the 2024 blaze which targeted companies delivering satellite equipment from Elon Musk’s Starlink to Ukraine.
Prosecutors said on Thursday that he also discussed with his handler from Russia’s Wagner mercenary group plans to kidnap the co-founder of finance app Revolut and torch a warehouse in the Czech Republic.
Earl appeared in the dock at London’s Old Bailey court alongside Jake Reeves, 23, who had also pleaded guilty to aggravated arson and a National Security Act charge of obtaining a material benefit from a foreign intelligence agency.
“This case is all about the efforts of the Russian Federation to gain pernicious global influence using social media to enlist saboteurs vast distances from Moscow,” Judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said.
She sentenced Earl to 17 years in prison for arson and National Security Act charges, along with a separate drugs charge. Reeves was sentenced to 12 years.
“Our parents and grandparents would have had a simple term for what Dylan Earl and Jake Reeves did: treason,” Cheema-Grubb added.
Earl and Reeves were sentenced with four others who were convicted for their part in a plot to burn down warehouses on an industrial estate in east London on behalf of Wagner.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin; editing by William James and Kate Holton)
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