Suspicion of espionage — search of AfD politician Krah in Brussels
Due to a number of cases in the past, it is increasingly suspected that some AfD politicians have conspicuous links to Russia and China.
This suspicion now appears to have been confirmed with regard to an employee (Jian G.) of AfD MEP Krah. He was arrested last month on suspicion of spying for China and his home in Dresden was searched. Subsequently, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office had the offices of the former top candidate Krah in the European Parliament searched.
Krah had hired the employee in question, who had come to Germany from China in 2022, as an assistant after he entered the European Parliament for the AfD in 2019. After the allegations of espionage against his employee became known, he announced that he wanted to dismiss him.
The employee of the AfD MEP is alleged to have spied on Chinese dissidents in Germany and to have passed on information from the European Parliament to a Chinese secret service. He is also alleged to have offered himself as a contact for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service.
The specific suspected offence: acting as an agent for a foreign secret service in a particularly serious case pursuant to § 99 Abs. 1 Nr. 1, Abs. 2 StGB.
§ 99 Abs. 1 StGB of the German Criminal Code, anyone who carries out intelligence activities for the secret service of a foreign power with the aim of communicating or supplying facts, objects or knowledge or who declares their willingness to carry out such activities is liable to a custodial sentence of up to five years or a monetary penalty.
§ Section 99 para. 2 of the German Criminal Code also lists two particularly serious cases, which are punishable by a prison sentence of between one and ten years. Among other things, a particularly serious case exists if, as allegedly in the case of Maximilian Krah’s employee, the offender provides facts that are kept secret by an official body and abuses a position of responsibility that places him under a special obligation to keep such secrets.
A Bundeswehr officer close to the AfD also faced a similar accusation and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court at the end of May. The officer had worked at the Bundeswehr Procurement Office in Koblenz and had obtained sensitive information from there, all of which (1,400 pages of material) was classified. He subsequently offered these documents to both the Russian consulate in Bonn and the Russian embassy in Berlin.
The soldier was arrested on 9 August 2023 and was remanded in custody until the main trial. In this case, too, the charges included Section 99 (1) StGB.
In addition, according to the judgement of the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court, the accused German army officer was liable to prosecution under Section 353b StGB for betraying official secrets.
According to the convicted man, an acute fear of a nuclear escalation of the Ukraine war and joining the AfD at the time were the motives for the offence.
What motivated Maximilian Krah’s employee to spy for the Chinese government is still unclear and will probably only become an issue during the main trial.
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