A Bulgarian migrant who shouted lurid sexual remarks at a group of children in an incident that saw a 13-year-old Scottish girl brandishing an axe and knife against her attackers has been found guilty.
The case of a 13-year-old girl who held an axe and knife while another child shouted “get the fuck away from us” at a leering migrant male has resulted in a guilty ruling for Bulgarian migrant male Ilia Belov, 22. The case attracted immense media attention after footage of part of the incident of the attack in Dundee, Scotland, the United Kingdom in August 2025 was published online.
This attention was intensified particularly after police, politicians, and media acted together to scorn the public for discussing the case, with authorities decrying misinformation while spreading — the court result now suggests — disinformation of their own. Police have now acknowledged information they gave “did not fully reflect the situation” but stopped short of an apology.
Ilia Belov has been found guilty of assaulting a 12-year-old girl in Dundee on August 23rd 2025, and of behaving in a “threatening or abusive manner” towards four girls aged between 12 and 14 years old. His 20-year-old sister, Nadjedzha Belova, earlier pleaded guilty to assaulting a 13-year-old girl in the same incident. Both will be sentenced on August 5th.
In the social media footage that was widely seen at the time of the 2025 attack, a male confronts a group of children, who are shouting at the man to leave them alone. As one girl shouts “get the fuck away from us”, another clearly distressed girl pulls a hand-axe and a knife from the waistband of her trousers.
The court heard Belov’s defence that he had been walking to the shops to buy cigarettes when a group of children, with zero provocation, started shouting abuse at him, including “fucking migrant”, reports The Daily Record. Belov claims he then called his 20-year-old sister to the scene because he was scared of the group of young girls.
Once his sister arrived, Belov claimed he then believed one of the girls was going to attack Nadjedzha Belova, so he pushed the child to the ground. He said the girls were “disrespecting me” and he only went after them to find out why, adding “I am human. I deserve to ask them why I deserve so much disrespect. I didn’t do anything to them.”
But the judge, Sheriff Timothy Niven-Smith, said Belov’s defence was “wholly unconvincing and self-serving” and rejected it.
The court heard, in fact, that it was Belov who had shouted at the children first and was said to have called to them “hello sexy, I’ll show you a good time”. Belov swore in court “No, I swear on my god” that he didn’t offer the girls “a good time”, but this was rejected. The judge said “I am entirely satisfied by proof beyond reasonable doubt that the trigger for all of this were the comments that you made”.
The court heard the children called Belov a “creep” after he propositioned them, which led to them being assaulted by the migrant pair. The BBC states the sister, Nadjedzha Belova, assaulted the 13-year-old by pulling her by the hair, dragging her to the ground, and hitting her in the head and a 12-year-old was thrown to the ground. One of the girls was hospitalised by the severity of the attack.
The broadcaster also notes the remarks of the mother of one of the young girls, who welcomed the prosecution and called it “a good thing”. She said the girls were “telling the truth and they were slandered. There were too many lies at the start, so I’m glad it’s all come out”.
Indeed, while the footage of scared children trying to defend themselves against a migrant male quickly went viral after the August 2025 attack, the official line quickly afterward was that it was the migrants, in fact, who were the victims and police first moved to charge the children, not the migrant adults. On August 27th, four days after the incident, Scottish police admonished the public for “speculation” and said in a statement:
We are aware of misinformation being shared on social media in relation to an incident where a Bulgarian couple were approached by youths in St Ann Lane, Dundee, on Saturday, 23 August 2025. A 12-year-old girl has been charged with being in possession of offensive weapons.
The police’s briefing of the press led to The Courier reporting that day: “It is understood that, despite reviewing CCTV and making other inquiries, officers have found nothing to support the allegations made against the two individuals”. The same newspaper also published a puff-piece interview with Belov during this period when his victim had been charged but he had not yet been arrested.
These statements was leapt upon by political actors to push the idea that there had been an anti-migrant attack against Bulgarians in Aberdeen. Humza Yousaf, a Pakistani-heritage and race-obsessed politician who is a former First Minister of Scotland hectored those discussing the case online — factually, it now transpires — by ranting: “Stephen-Yaxley Lennon [Tommy Robinson] and his racist far-right mob told me migrants tried to sexually assault the girls? Who would have guessed the far-right were full of bullshit?”.
John Swinney, the present First Minister of Scotland, was also quick out the gate in decrying what he claimed to be misinformation about the Aberdeen case. On the 28th of August 2025 he blamed Elon Musk for spreading “misinformation” and “deliberate disinformation”. He said:
But what is very important is that Police Scotland have issued a warning about deliberate misinformation that is being used to stoke up fear and alarm in our communities.
I am concerned about that and everybody should be concerned about that because we live in a fundamentally safer country today than we did 40 years ago… But people like Elon Musk, with the misinformation that has been stoked up about this case, are trying to undermine that sense of cohesion within our communities and it is totally and utterly unacceptable, and Police Scotland are absolutely right to call it out.
Police haven’t gone as far for apologising for the anti-mis information disinformation they appear to have — inadvertently or not — had a hand in, but did release a statement after the conviction of Belov. The force this week cleaved to what fake news they still could, noting some online had wrongly speculated on the asylum status of the Bulgarian child sex pest.
STV reports Tayside police spokesman commander chief superintendent Elaine Logue said:
A 12-year-old girl was cautioned and charged… following further investigation, including review of CCTV, Ilia Belov and Nadjedzha Belova were charged… This was a distressing incident and led to understandable community concern and significant speculation across social media, including misinformation that Belov and Belova are asylum seekers.
The incident is an example of the complex situations which officers are required to deal with, and I recognise that initial information did not fully reflect the situation.