Former German intelligence chief arrested over espionage allegations News
Jan Kleihues (Stefan Müller, photographer), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Former German intelligence chief arrested over espionage allegations

The former foreign intelligence chief of Germany, August Hanning, was arrested on Tuesday on allegations of espionage and attempted treason.

Hanning, who served as head of the Federal Intelligence Service  (Bundesnachrichtendienst, known by its acronym BND) from 1998 to 2005, was detained along with a former aide, identified as Manfred D., who served as his office manager at the time.

According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, Manfred D. is suspected of having supplied Hanning with approximately 2,000 highly classified documents between 2010 and 2022. This included highly classified material intended exclusively for internal use within the BND and for senior-level intelligence briefings at the Chancellery.

The reasons behind the arrangement between Hanning and Manfred D. remain unclear. However, prosecutors suspect that Hanning intended to profit from the information in the course of his private consulting activities, which he had taken up in the meantime, making this one of the biggest espionage scandals in Germany. BND previously became the subject of scrutiny in 2009 when Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the body should not withhold information from Parliament without good cause.

Notably, the investigation that eventually led to Hanning’s arrest on Tuesday began with a separate case involving the abduction of businesswoman Christina Block’s children from their father in Denmark and their transfer to Germany in January 2024. Block and her former husband had been involved in a custody dispute for several years.

According to German media reports, Hanning and a retired official from the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office were suspected of accepting a contract from Block in 2022 to abduct her children while working for a private security company. The investigation later led to a search of Hanning’s home, where investigators reportedly found evidence that raised suspicions of a separate case involving classified information from the BND. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office said that the current investigation into Hanning and Manfred D. was based on evidence found during that search.

Both suspects are expected to appear before an investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice, who will then formally present the arrest warrants to the accused and determine whether they will remain in pre-trial detention.

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