A former aide to a member of parliament for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party has been sentenced to almost five years in prison for spying on behalf of China.
Jian Guo was convicted on Tuesday of acting as an agent for the Chinese intelligence service while working for Maximilian Krah, a former member of the European parliament who now sits for the AfD in Germany’s Bundestag.
The case has stirred concern about the extent to which Europe is being targeted by Chinese spymasters.
Guo, a German national, was found to have gathered information including confidential documents when he worked in Krah’s office in the European parliament between 2019 and 2024, and passed them on to Chinese authorities. He had denied the charges.
The court in Dresden heard he had collected personal information about top AfD figures, including its leaders, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, as well as keeping watch on Chinese dissidents in Europe.
Sentencing Guo to four years and nine months in prison, the presiding judge, Hans Schlüter-Staats, told him: “There is no question that you were an employee of a Chinese intelligence service.”
A female Chinese accomplice, identified only as Yaqi X in line with German privacy laws, received a suspended sentence of one year and nine months.
She admitted to having given Guo information about flights, cargo and passengers from the Leipzig/Halle airport where she worked. In particular, the information had focused on the transport of military vehicles, troops and military drones, the court heard.
Krah, 47, told the court he had employed Guo on the basis of his language skills and experience of running an import-export firm. Following Guo’s arrest, he said, he had “taken the necessary steps and significantly increased the security in my office”.
The MP said he was not surprised by the prison sentence and had welcomed the trial, which had helped him to gain more clarity about people he said “of whom I have become a victim”.
Separately, Dresden’s public prosecutor’s office is investigating Krah on suspicion of bribery and money laundering in connection with payments he is alleged to have received from China when he was an MEP.
Earlier this month, the Bundestag lifted his immunity, allowing investigators to search his offices in the Bundestag, in Brussels and Dresden, and at his home. Krah has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation an “attempt at political intimidation”.
Krah was excluded from the AfD’s European parliament delegation in 2024 due to the accusations against Guo, as well as comments he himself had made to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the SS, the Nazis’ main paramilitary force, were “not all criminals”.
However, Krah was effectively rehabilitated seven months ago when he took a seat as an MP in the Bundestag after the AfD achieved its highest result yet in a national election.
Beijing has previously denied accusations of espionage in Europe. Its foreign ministry last year said reports in Europe about Chinese spying were all “hyping up with an aim to smear and suppress China”.
