BERLIN (AP) – A German has been accused of spying for allegedly passing on information about properties used by the German parliament to Russian military intelligence, prosecutors said on Thursday.
The suspect, identified only as Jens F. under German privacy rules, worked for a company that had been repeatedly hired to check portable electrical devices by the Bundestag, or the lower house of parliament, federal prosecutors said in a statement.
With that, he had access to PDF files with plans of the properties involved. The Bundestag is located in the Reichstag building, a Berlin landmark, but it also uses several other sites.
Prosecutors said, sometime before the beginning of September 2017, the suspect “decided on his own” to provide Russian intelligence with information about the properties. They said he sent the PDF files to an official at the Russian embassy in Berlin, who was an officer with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.
They did not specify how their activities came to light.
The charges against the suspect, who is not in custody, were filed in a Berlin court on February 12. The court will have to decide whether to proceed with the trial.
Relations between Germany and Russia have been affected by a growing list of issues in recent years.
In October, the European Union imposed sanctions on two Russian officials and part of the GRU agency over a cyber attack on the German parliament in 2015.
In addition, a Russian man accused of killing a Georgian in broad daylight in central Berlin on the orders of Moscow in 2019 is on trial in Berlin.
And last year’s poisoning by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was flown to Germany for treatment and arrested immediately after returning to Russia, added another layer of tension.