The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office has filed charges of espionage against a former employee of current Bundestag member and former European Parliamentarian Maximilian Krah (AfD).
According to the General Public Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe, the former employee and a Chinese co-accused are “sufficiently suspected of having carried out a secret intelligence activity against the Federal Republic of Germany on behalf of a foreign intelligence service.”
The accused is alleged to have been a member of a Chinese intelligence service since 2002. His intelligence work is said to have covered a wide range of topics, including within the territory of the Federal Republic and against persons residing in Germany.
From September 2019 until his arrest in April 2024, he worked officially as an assistant to the AfD member Krah in the European Parliament. The accused is said to have used this function to gather information on consultations and decisions of the European Parliament for the Chinese service. To this end, he is alleged to have obtained more than 500 documents, including some that the European Parliament had classified as particularly sensitive.
It is also alleged that he gathered information on leading AfD politicians during that time. According to the indictment, he spied on Chinese opposition figures and dissidents in Germany in the years 2023 and 2024. For this purpose, he is said to have, for example, posed as a critic of the Chinese state leadership on social media and tried to obtain personal information and other information about actual dissidents.
The accused was arrested on April 22, 2024 and remains in detention.