On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 16th. Sofia is curled up on the couch in her small apartment in Athens after a hard day at work. She grabs her knitting bag and turns on the TV to listen to the news while she knits her spring sweater. At the turn, she looks at the screen and finds the close-up of her friend Maria, the one from the yarn store. The reporter recounts that the Greek Secret Service (EYP) has discovered that Maria Schala was not the cute crochet shop saleswoman and colleague Sophia thought, but a dangerous Russian spy. “I still find it hard to believe,” says Sophia, who prefers not to use her real name on ABC. Sophia was one of Maria’s clients. “She was beautiful, over time we became friends and she told me a lot about her life. When we met, she told me that she was the daughter of Greeks who immigrated to Belize and that she had no family, which seemed a little strange to me, but I didn’t want to ask too many questions either,” Sofia said. ABC. Related news record German spy accused of being a double agent who sold state secrets to Russia Rosalia Sanchez Carsten L. has not been arrested. She will be charged with high treason because she passed information to the Russian secret service this year. The last time the friends saw each other was in December, at Maria’s apartment, where they prepared a farewell meal before the Christmas holidays. “I would spend until mid-January in my home country and she, until February in Kyrgyzstan, at least that’s what she told me. A few weeks ago, when I saw that she wasn’t replying to my messages, I called the store and the clerk told me Maria wasn’t coming back again. Maria Shala posed as Another compatriot, and she had a woolen shop in the Athenian suburb of Pangrati, a Facebook profile she filled out with pictures of her cat Nath and her boyfriend, Panayotis, with whom she shared an apartment a few meters from her shop.. The business was going well. Sales have increased in recent months, And Maria decided, in addition to hiring a saleswoman, to rent the building next door to expand the shop and set up a crochet school, according to what she told Sofia.A photography lover, he participated in 2019 in a joint photography exhibition in a famous gallery in the Greek capital.A European citizen who arrived in Greece from Mexico in the year 2018. Impersonated a girl who died at birth in 1991 At the beginning of the year, British intelligence services warned Greece that a spy being held in Slovenia was linked to a Greek citizen named Maria Schala.When the EYP showed up at Maria’s house, he had disappeared.The EYP announced that The real identity of the spy is Irina Alexandrovna Smerva and that she arrived in Greece from Mexico in 2018, and obtained Greek citizenship soon after. A year later, he opened the store that served as a cover to hide the actions entrusted to him by the spy group. To create the profile of Mariah Schalla, the spy had substituted the identity of a girl who died in 1991 a few hours after giving birth. An investigation is underway into how he managed to obtain the Greek citizenship that has allowed him to move freely around Europe, even in the midst of a pandemic. In Greece, he made two trips that raised all doubts: the first to the city of Alexandroupolis in the north of the country, and the second to the city of Larissa, where there is a NATO drone base. In his apartment he left his personal belongings, his cat Nath and a laptop computer which the Greek police are analyzing. The mission that brought Alexandrovna to Greece was not made public by the EYP. The last time the young Russian called her Greek phone was on January 4 and it is believed that she fled to Thailand to meet her husband, Daniel Campos, who is also a spy.
