The Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe.
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German police have arrested an assistant (since 2019) to a member of the European Parliament from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on suspicion of a “particularly serious case” of espionage for China, federal prosecutors said on Tuesday.
Jian G., an employee of AfD’s main candidate in June’s European Parliament elections, Maximilian Kra, is accused of providing information to the Chinese intelligence service about European Parliament negotiations and decisions, prosecutors said in a statement. In March, Kra was questioned by German counterintelligence on suspicions that he took money from Kremlin agents, which he denies.
His associate G., who lived in Brussels as well as the eastern German city of Dresden, also spied on Chinese opposition figures in Germany, prosecutors said. Authorities arrested him in Dresden on Monday and searched his apartments.
“He is charged with a particularly serious case of working for a foreign secret service,” the statement said.
German Interior Minister Nancy Feser called the allegations “extremely serious” on Tuesday. “If it is confirmed that someone spied for China in the European Parliament, it is an attack from within on European democracy,” she said in a statement. “Anyone who hires such an employee is also responsible for that,” she added.
An AfD spokesman said the news was “very disturbing”. “But since we currently have no additional information on the case, we have to wait for the further investigation by the prosecutors,” the party said, quoted by Reuters.
Maximilian Kra is a member of the European Parliament of:
- International Trade Commission
- of two subcommittees – on human rights and on security and defense
- of the delegation for relations with the United States.
He replaces his fellow party members in four other committees:
- Committee on Foreign Affairs
- Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs
- Committee on Transport and Tourism
- Regional Development Commission.
“This is an outrageous, very serious incident. Here one of the closest associates of the main candidate of the AfD has been arrested for spying on opposition and dissidents in Germany for the Chinese services. “This somehow does not surprise us at all,” commented the chairman of the commission for Foreign Affairs in the European Parliament David McAllister (CDU).
Maximilian Kra. In March, TikTok stopped showing his posts full of anti-immigrant and homophobic slurs on users’ For You Feed because of “systemic irregularities. Their views dropped from hundreds of thousands to a few thousand.
The suspect was arrested on the same day that three German nationals were detained on suspicion of working with China’s Ministry of State Security to transfer technology that could be used for military purposes.
The arrests came a week after Chancellor Olaf Scholz traveled to China to press Beijing over its support for Russia’s wartime economy and raise issues of intellectual property theft and fair market access.
The two men and a woman were arrested in the western German cities of Düsseldorf and Bad Homburg on Monday, the federal prosecutor general said. At the time of their arrest, the suspects were in talks for research projects that could be useful for expanding China’s naval combat power, according to prosecutors.
“As the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, we tracked down these people very early on and continued to monitor their behavior and activities,” counterintelligence chief Thomas Haldenwang said at a meeting of his agency in Berlin on Monday.
According to the federal attorney general, the detainees are “highly suspected of espionage from an unspecified date before June 2022.” The suspects’ homes and workplaces were searched.
According to federal prosecutors:
- one of the men “used” the detained couple, who ran a company in Düsseldorf
- the company has served as “an environment for establishing contacts and cooperation with people from the German scientific and research community”
- a study was prepared for a Chinese contract partner on the technological status of machine parts that are also used for the operation of powerful marine engines, such as those used in warships;
- behind the Chinese contractor is the Secret Service agent from whom one of the suspects received his orders.
The German government considers the arrests a success. “The area of innovative technology from Germany that could be used for military purposes in the present case is a particularly sensitive area,” an interior ministry spokesman said on Monday. “That is why it is even more important to counter espionage here as consistently as we have been able to do in this case. Everything else, additional connections and origins, will be revealed by the investigations, he said.
A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry spoke of talks with the Chinese side on the case. However, it is too early to make concrete statements, he said when asked if the Chinese ambassador had been summoned.
Late on Monday, the Chinese embassy in Germany rejected accusations that China had been spying in the European country. “We call on the German side to stop using espionage allegations to politically manipulate China’s image and defame our country,” the embassy said in a statement carried by the state-run Xinhua news agency.
