Man worked as assistant to Maximilian Krah, top candidate in European parliament elections, say prosecutors
A close adviser to a leading member of Germany’s far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland party has been arrested on suspicion on spying for China in the latest high-profile espionage case to have come to light.
Prosecutors said the man was aged 43 and had dual German and Chinese citizenship, and said it was believed he had been spying for the Chinese secret services for years. Investigators have accused Guo of spying in particular on Chinese opposition figures living in exile in Germany, having apparently posed as a dissident himself, and passing the information on to a liaison officer.
He came to Germany as a student, later working as a businessman, including for a solar panel company and an LED trader, and became Krah’s assistant in Brussels when he became a member of the European parliament in 2019. Shortly after, he accompanied Krah on a trip to. He is believed to have been working for Beijing as a spy at this point at the latest, prosecutors said.
The German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said there would be an “exhaustive investigation” of the charges. If they were proved to be true, she said, the case would be nothing less than “an attack on European democracy from within”.She said Krah and the AfD would also be potentially culpable. “Whoever employs a staffer such as this, also has responsibility for this,” she said.
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