Another suspect of spying for China was arrested yesterday, Monday night, by the German police, according to information from public television. The suspect even works as an assistant to the MEP of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Maximilian Kra in Brussels. However, the Chinese side denied the claims of the German authorities.

43-year-old Jan G. was arrested last night in Dresden and is believed to have been spying on the activity of Chinese opposition movements on behalf of Beijing, while passing information to the Chinese secret services from the circles of the European Parliament. According to the same sources, Jan G. he had also offered German authorities a decade ago to cooperate with them as an informant, but had been deemed unreliable and possibly a double agent for China.

The arrested person has been working in the AfD MEP’s office since 2019 and has accompanied him, among other things, on a trip to China. Zeit-Online even reports that it was then that his cooperation with the Chinese authorities began. According to BILD, the AfD’s federal executive committee held an emergency meeting last night to assess the matter. “Mr Kra is now becoming a problem for the AfD,” a top party official told the newspaper.

The new case, however, according to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, is not related to the arrest, also yesterday, of three suspects for spying for China in Dusseldorf and Bad Homburg. The first three arrested are believed to have acted as middlemen in order to transfer high military technology from Germany to China.

The Chinese side today denied any connection between Beijing and the arrested. “We call on the German side to stop exploiting the espionage allegations in order to politically manipulate China’s image and discredit it,” the Chinese embassy in Berlin said.

“The three arrests are just the beginning,” countered Christian Democratic Party (CDU) security chief Roderick Kiesewetter, and expressed the belief that there are other similar cases in Germany. The country, he stressed, “is poorly equipped against hybrid attacks, including intelligence services and is therefore particularly vulnerable.” Beijing “has a fairly easy field in Germany, lacking the necessary recognition of the risks of cooperation with China, especially in business and science,” Mr Kiesewetter added to the RND Network.