(Adnkronos) – Berlin announces that it has recently expelled “numerous” Russian agents in the face of the growing threat of sabotage acts led by Moscow. German authorities are doing “everything they can to counter… Russian espionage, sabotage and cyberattacks,” Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sonja Kock said during a press conference.
Russian secret services operating in Germany have been “recently weakened by the expulsion of numerous agents,” she continued, without specifying the number of those expelled or the timing. Her comments came after German media reported that Russian secret services are believed to have employed low-level agents in a plot to plant explosive devices on DHL cargo planes. Agents who did not have a position within the security services and were usually recruited through apps, reported the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and public broadcasters Wdr and Ndr.
Investigations into “potential acts of sabotage with incendiary devices in DHL packages are continuing intensively,” Kock said, declining to go into details. An incident last July, in which packages exploded at DHL depots in Germany and Britain, was described by German intelligence chief Thomas Haldenwang as a “lucky accident” because of the limited impact it had.
Testifying before a parliamentary committee in October, Haldenwang said “there would have been a serious incident” if the packages had exploded in flight on the planes.
“The risk of sabotage… has increased significantly in Germany since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine,” Koch stressed.
