By Jacqueline Melcher, Martina Herzog and Lena Klimkeit, dpa
BERLIN – Three Germans have been arrested on suspicion of spying for the Chinese secret service, German prosecutors said. Two men and a woman were arrested in the western German cities of Dusseldorf and Bad Homburg on Monday, the Federal Public Prosecutor General said.
At the time of their arrest, the suspects were in negotiations about research projects that could be useful for the expansion of China’s maritime combat power in particular, according to the prosecutors.
“As the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, we tracked down these people very early on and continued to monitor their behaviour and activities,” said the president of the domestic intelligence services, Thomas Haldenwang, at a meeting of his agency in Berlin on Monday.
According to the Federal Public Prosecutor General, those detained are “strongly suspected of spying since an unspecified date before June 2022.”
The homes and workplaces of the suspects were searched. One of the men is said to have procured information on innovative military technologies for an employee of the Chinese secret service MSS who was in China.
To this end, he had “used” the detained couple, who ran a company in Dusseldorf, the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement. The company had served as a “medium for establishing contacts and collaborating with people from the German scientific and research community.”
A study was said to have been prepared for a Chinese contractual partner on the technological state of machine parts that are also used for the operation of powerful ship engines, such as those used in combat ships.
The secret service employee, from whom one of the suspects received his orders, was allegedly behind the Chinese contractor.
The suspects are to be brought before the investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice on Monday and Tuesday, who will decide on the execution of the pre-trial detention.
The German government sees the arrests as a success.
“The area of innovative technologies from Germany that can be used for military purposes in the current case is a particularly sensitive area,” said a spokesman for the Interior Ministry on Monday.
“It is therefore all the more important to counter espionage here as consistently as we have succeeded in doing in this case.” Everything else, further connections and backgrounds, would be revealed by the investigations, he said.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office spoke of an exchange with the Chinese side on the case. However, it was too early to make any concrete announcements, he said when asked whether the Chinese ambassador had been summoned.
Late on Monday, the Chinese embassy in Germany rejected accusations that China was allegedly spying in the European country.
“We call on the German side to stop exploiting the espionage allegation in order to politically manipulate the image of China and defame China,” said an embassy statement published by state news agency Xinhua.
