Romanian Court Extends Preventive Arrest For Espionage Suspects

"The Bucharest Court of Appeal, Section II Criminal, allowed the extension by 30 days of the preventive arrest measure applied to Achim Floricel and Zikolov Petar Marinov," said a press release issued Friday by the court.

The decision can be challenged in the Supreme Court.

This is the Second arrest extension for the two defendants.

Floricel Achim and Marinov Zikolov were placed in preventive arrest on March 2 by the Bucharest Court of Appeal, at the proposition of organized crime prosecutors, and they were charged with having handled information that could endanger national security. The measure was confirmed by the High Court of Justice.

In the explanation for the decision, the Bucharest Court of Appeal stated Achim Floricel, between 2002 and 2007, got hold of state secret documents, as well as documents whose importance makes their declassification a risk for national security, consisting of military communications systems, radar frequencies, NATO standard maps, charts and graphs of sub-units and military technology, military unit indexes, defense plans and others.

Thus, Achim Floricel allegedly gave Marinov Zikolov these documents for various sums of money, generally up to $1,000, and Marinov Zikolov allegedly forwarded these documents to a foreign country.

The Ambassador of Bulgaria in Bucharest said Marinov Zikolov worked as a military attaché of the embassy between November 1998 and mid-2000 and he did not complete his mandate because he returned to Bulgaria, later coming back to Romania as businessman.