German charged for spying at parliament

BERLIN: German prosecutors said on Thursday they have filed spying charges against a man suspected of passing floorplans of parliament to Russian secret services, in a new case that risks further inflaming tensions between Berlin and Moscow.

The suspect, a German national named only as Jens F., worked for a company that was repeatedly contracted by the Bundestag to carry out regular checks on electric equipment across parliament premises. “Against this background, the defendant had access to PDF files with the floor plans of” parliamentary properties, said federal prosecutors.

The suspect is believed to have decided sometime in the summer of 2017 to pass on the information to Russian secret services. “For that, he prepared a data carrier with the corresponding PDF files and sent it to an employee in the Russian embassy in Berlin, who mainly works for the Russian military secret service GRU,” said prosecutors.