Nightmare of mother trapped in web of fear
ADRIANA Constantinescu’s life in Britain has become a fear-stalked nightmare, her every move watched by members of one of the world’s most notorious intelligence services.
Whether she’s taking her children to school, meeting friends in Hampstead, north London, or just going to the shops, the 35-year-old now expects to see at least one member of Romania’s SEI agency watching her.
Despite early efforts to hide their presence, they are now brazen, openly communicating with each other via radio as part of their intimidation campaign. When she approached one agent last year, his radio squawked a warning from another: “She’s behind you.”
A report by a private security firm tasked with assessing the level of her surveillance concluded: “It is highly probable that a large team of operatives are being used. They understand the need to rotate people and position.”
Having bungled an attempt to kidnap her in 2016, every day sees the mother-of-three asking the same question: are they just making my life hell or will they try again? When Russian GRU agents tried to murder ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last year, the world reacted with outrage. Romania isn’t Russia – it is a Nato ally which currently holds the EU presidency.
But it’s also a police state in which one-inthree of its 19 million citizens is regularly or intermittently wiretapped.
On Tuesday its president Klaus Iohannis, 59, is expected to declare all convictions since 2014 unsafe after the emergence of a corruption scandal in which Romania’s internal security service, the SRI, used agents acting as judges to illegally prosecute and convict those which it considered enemies of the state.
Adriana’s “crime” is simply that she is the partner of Alexander Adamescu, 40, a Romanian writer and businessman now in Wandsworth prison awaiting extradition to Romania on a European arrest warrant. His crime? To be the son of a Romanian tycoon who owned a newspaper critical of the regime.
His father Dan was jailed in 2016 for allegedly authorising the bribery of two judges with £20,000 to give favourable decisions in insolvency cases involving companies in which he was a shareholder. He died in custody last year. During the trial prosecutors offered no evidence of a link between Dan and the individual who carried out the act, and relied on the word of one witness – a lawyer accused of stealing more than £100,000 from the tycoon.
Not content with that, prosecutors went after London-based Alexander. British courts are powerless to act against the extradition, as it was made through the European arrest warrant scheme.
“Alexander and I were living a happy life in London. Now he is in Wandsworth waiting for extradition on trumped-up charges and my life is a living hell,” said former marketing executive Adriana from her London home. “It all changed for me in March 2016, when they tried to kidnap me. Until then I couldn’t imagine that even Romania would send agents for a wife and mother in London.” It was 8.45am on March 8 when two agents pounced as Adriana dropped her children off at nursery.
“I was walking back to my Range Rover when I saw a man with a bandana covering his face walk towards me. It didn’t register that I was his target until he grabbed my arms from behind. I started to scream.
“People were watching and I was shouting to call the police, before he put his hand over my mouth. Then another man joined him. I kept fighting back and then a black cab stopped and the driver opened the door. I saw he had a passenger who started taking pictures with her phone. That’s when the men left me and ran back to their car.” Police began an investigation but it proved fruitless. “They know it wasn’t an attempted robbery – my Range Rover, my £5,000 earrings, my handbag were all untouched. But I’d just returned from Romania where I had given interviews and criticised the state. The SRI doesn’t like that. They went after Dan, are going after Alexander and now they have sent the SEI after me. Things are no better now than when the Securitate ran its torture cells under Nicolae Ceausescu.”
It took almost two years after the fall of the dictator in 1989 for the Securitate and its network of agents and informers to be dissolved. Its successors – the SRI (internal) and SEI (external) – were removed from any role in criminal prosecutions. But the SRI used 68 secret and illegal “protocols” to prosecute those considered enemies of the state.
Last week Romania’s Constitutional Court finally ruled these protocols “unconstitutional”.
Speaking last night, Romania expert David Clark, formerly a special political adviser to former foreign secretary Robin Cook, said: “Both Adriana and Alexander have been caught up in the machinations of a corrupt system.
“Surveillance of a UK resident by a foreign security agency on British soil is unacceptable yet it seems the UK is doing little about it. In the meantime, Romania has been allowed, as an EU member state, to use mechanisms such as the European arrest warrant. This is extremely worrying behaviour by a Nato ally.”
Mr Clark said the EU had been complicit: “The EU claims intelligence issues are not its concern. But intelligence services subverted the law, with dire consequences for human rights in Romania – that is an EU matter.”
Adriana said: “Now this corruption has been exposed, we are hopeful that Alexander’s case will be thrown out and he can return to his family. Whether the SRI will ever leave us alone, though, who can say?”
‘I fought two agents who tried to kidnap me outside the nursery’