Investigators on Monday arrested three German nationals in western Germany on suspicion of spying for China, prosecutors said, accusing them of gathering information on technology that could be used for military purposes.
\nThe trio, named as Herwig F., Ina F. and Thomas R. \u201care strongly suspected of having worked for a Chinese secret service\u201d at some point before June 2022, the prosecutors said in a statement.
\nThe suspects were arrested in Duesseldorf and Bad Homburg in western Germany and their homes and workplaces were also searched.
\nThomas R. is suspected of working as an agent for an employee of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), obtaining information in Germany on technologies that could be used for military purposes.
\nHe is said to have established contact with Herwig F. and his wife Ina F., who run a company in Duesseldorf, in order to access such technologies and make contacts in the German scientific and research community.
\nThe company signed an agreement with a German university to provide \u201cknowledge transfer\u201d, the prosecutors said.
\nThe first phase of the project was to prepare a study for a Chinese \u201ccontractual partner\u201d on state-of-the-art machine parts used in powerful ship engines, they said.
\nThe contractual partner was the MSS employee that Thomas R. was working for, and the project was financed by Chinese state agencies, they said.
\nAt the time of their arrest, the suspects were also allegedly in further negotiations about research projects that could be useful for the expansion of China\u2019s maritime combat capabilities.
\nThe trio is also accused of purchasing a special laser from Germany on behalf of the MSS and exporting it to China without authorization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Investigators on Monday arrested three German nationals in western Germany on suspicion of spying for China, prosecutors said, accusing them of gathering information on technology that could be used for military purposes. The trio, named as Herwig F., Ina F. and Thomas R. \u201care strongly suspected of having worked for a Chinese secret service\u201d at …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19497,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19499,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19494\/revisions\/19499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}