Germany's MI5 investigates its former boss for hard-Right links
Germany’s MI5 is investigating its former boss over alleged links to the hard-Right in the latest embarrassment for the country’s scandal-hit intelligence agencies.
The BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, has asked the country’s national crime agency to hand over any information it has on Hans-Georg Maaßen as part of the probe, German media reported on Wednesday.
Mr Maaßen, 60, ran the BfV from 2012 until 2018, when he was forced into early retirement after being accused of ignoring evidence of neo-Nazis targeting refugees during riots in the eastern city of Chemnitz.
The BfV’s request is reportedly related to a separate investigation by the Federal Crime Office (BKA) into the hard-Right Reichsbuerger, or Citizens of the Reich, movement.
Some of the movement’s members allegedly plotted to storm the German parliament late last year and overthrow the country’s government before a wave of arrests ruined the plan.
One individual, who is being treated as a witness in the investigation, phoned Mr Maaßen after police searched his home. The call was tapped by detectives, the Bild newspaper reported.
‘Unlawful’
Mr Maaßen said any investigation into him by the BfV would be political persecution.
“If this is true, then it is obvious that the BfV is no longer being used to protect the constitution, but is being misused to protect the government and to fight and persecute government critics,” he said.
Mr Maaßen, who is a trained lawyer, also claimed that the witness in the Citizens of the Reich investigation was his client.
“The interception of a telephone conversation between a witness in a criminal case and his lawyer is unlawful,” he said.
Germany’s interior ministry, which oversees the BfV, declined to comment on the report.
Since retiring from the intelligence agency, Mr Maaßen has proven to be a controversial figure within Germany’s conservative CDU party, of which he is a member. He has repeatedly made inflammatory remarks on migration policy.
At the beginning of this year, he claimed the policy was being influenced by a “green race theory… according to which whites are an inferior race and Arab and African men must therefore be brought into the country”.
His remarks prompted the CDU hierarchy to try and remove him as a member. However, a CDU party committee in the eastern state of Thuringia, a stronghold of the hard-Right AfD party, blocked the attempted expulsion last month.
Mr Maaßen ran unsuccessfully as a CDU candidate in the 2021 general election in Thuringia.
The news came after the arrest of a top spy at Germany’s foreign intelligence agency last year over suspicions that he had sold state secrets to Russia.
The spy, Carsten Linke, was reported to have sympathised politically with the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
