By Oliver Denzer and Sarah Marsh
DRESDEN/BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -An aide to a top far-right politician was jailed for almost five years on Tuesday after a German court found him guilty of spying on German military shipments and Chinese dissidents for over 20 years.
The case has fuelled concern in Germany that Europe has become a major target for Chinese espionage under President Xi Jinping, something Beijing has denied.
The Dresden Higher Regional Court said a German national, named only as Jian G. due to privacy rules, had identified and spied on Chinese dissidents in Europe, a court spokeswoman said.
His work had led to consequences for their families back in China, she said.
Jian G. also passed information to Chinese intelligence about the European Parliament and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) while working for Maximilian Krah, a former European lawmaker from the AfD, the spokeswoman added.
He collected information on military shipments departing Leipzig/Halle airport and people working in the defence industry, with the help of a woman identified as Yaqi X., who worked at a logistics company at the airport, she said.
The court sentenced Yaqi X. to nearly two years in prison, suspended on probation for three years.
The Chinese embassy in Germany did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The espionage charges were levelled at a time when Krah had been campaigning as the AfD's top candidate for the European Parliament and raised concerns about the pro-China and pro-Russia views of some senior members of the party.
Some AfD members saw the charges as an attempt to discredit Krah and the AfD ahead of the elections.
The party’s poll numbers dipped slightly after the allegations became public. Although Krah won a seat in the European Parliament, fellow AfD MEPs later excluded him from their delegation, following this and other controversies.
Half a year later he ran for the German national parliament, in a bid to rehabilitate himself, and became one of a new cohort of AfD politicians in the Bundestag when the AfD came in second place.
Support for the party has since further soared and it is currently topping some nationwide polls, ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservatives.
The German parliament earlier this month removed his immunity as a lawmaker due to an investigation against him on charges of bribery while he was a member of the European Parliament as well as money laundering in connection with Chinese payments.
Krah denies any wrongdoing in connection with those allegations.
On Tuesday he took to the social media platform X to say that he looked forward to gaining more "clarity about the espionage activities of which (he) was a victim" via the court's written reasoning in the case, which has yet to be published.
He wrote that he had significantly tightened security in his office after Jian G.'s arrest.
In years prior to Jian G.'s arrest, Krah had dismissed allegations that his aide had been lobbying for China as slander against himself.
(Reporting by Oliver Denzer and Maximilian Schwarz in Dresden and Sarah Marsh in Berlin; Editing by Ludwig Burger and Jon Boyle)
