Germany issues arrest warrant for Russian suspect in parliament hack: newspaper
BERLIN (Reuters) - German prosecutors believe a 2015 hack attack on the country's parliament was carried out by the same Russian operative who a year later derailed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign by breaking into her emails, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported.
Without giving a source, the newspaper said prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant for Dmitry Badin, 28, who is also wanted by U.S. authorities for hacking into Clinton's and the Democratic Party's email servers.
Germany's Bundestag discovered its systems had been broken into in May 2015 and concluded that the intrusions had been continuing since at least the beginning of that year. It was impossible to determine what information had been stolen.
According to the newspaper, German prosecutors believed, as does the U.S. FBI, that Badin was carrying out the attacks on behalf of Russia's GRU military intelligence.
The series of hacking attacks against Western email services took on added importance the following year, when selective leaks of purported campaign emails disrupted Clinton's campaign, costing her dearly in a close-fought battle for the presidency with Republican Donald Trump.
Leaked emails, also blamed on Russian operatives, also played a role in the French presidential election the year after that, though not in the German parliamentary vote that followed.
Prosecutors were not immediately available to comment.
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Scot W. Stevenson and Jonathan Oatis)
