Treason, Alleged

August Hanning, who led Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, from December 1998 to the end of November 2005, was arrested on Tuesday on warrants issued by the investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice. So was a man the federal prosecutor identifies only as Manfred D., who ran Hanning’s office at the BND and, the prosecutor says, ran the office of several of his successors from March 2012 to March 2026. Officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office made the arrests in the Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen district of Bavaria and the Steinfurt district of North Rhine-Westphalia, and began searches there and in Berlin, according to the prosecutor’s statement. The statement does not say which man was arrested where. The Guardian and the BBC reported, and DW reported citing WDR, NDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, that Hanning, who is 80, was detained at his home in Nordwalde near Münster, which is in the Steinfurt district, and that Manfred D. was detained in Bavaria. AP and Al Jazeera reported the reverse, placing Hanning’s arrest in Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen and Manfred D.’s in Steinfurt.

The statement lists four offences against Hanning, each with its section of the Criminal Code: treasonous spying (section 96, subsection 1), spying out state secrets (96(2)), attempted treason (section 94(1) read with section 22) and acting as an agent of a foreign intelligence service (section 99(1), number 1). Manfred D. is accused of aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous spying. The statement describes a strong suspicion against Hanning. It does not describe an indictment.

What the warrants allege

As the statement summarises them, the warrants say the two men agreed, probably in spring 2010, that Manfred D. would keep obtaining valuable BND intelligence for Hanning, for payment, which Hanning could put to profitable use in the private consulting work he had taken up. By June 2022, on the investigation’s current findings, Manfred D. had, the statement says, passed him close to 2,000 documents, many of them classified. The material was meant only for the BND’s internal use, to brief and prepare its leadership, in particular for the intelligence situation briefing, which the statement describes as a regular meeting of senior officials of the federal ministries and several German security agencies at the Chancellery.

Two allegations go further than possession. On one occasion, the statement says, Hanning “used classified intelligence provided by Manfred D. to draft an analysis for an officer of a foreign intelligence service,” in the English carried by AP. Hanning was also, it says, “in close contact with a representative of another foreign intelligence service, to whom he passed on political information, partially based on material provided by Manfred D., for several years.” The prosecutor has not named either country.

What the statute counts as treason

Treason under section 94 is not committed by holding a secret or by writing about one. The offence is committed by a person who communicates a state secret to a foreign power or one of its intermediaries, or otherwise lets it reach an unauthorised person or makes it public, in order to disadvantage Germany or favour a foreign power, “and thereby creates the danger of serious disadvantage to the external security of the Federal Republic of Germany”, in this publication’s translation. The minimum sentence is one year. Section 22 defines an attempt: a person attempts an offence who, according to his own conception of it, directly sets about carrying it out.

The statement does not say which facts the attempt count rests on. It does record a gap in the evidence about the analysis for the foreign officer: whether that product reached its addressee, it says, could not so far be established. The statute draws its line at that point. Completed treason needs the secret to have been communicated. An attempt needs the direct setting about.

The other counts do not turn on delivery. Section 96(1) punishes obtaining a state secret in order to betray it, with one to ten years; section 96(2), obtaining an officially protected state secret in order to disclose it, with six months to five years. Section 99 punishes intelligence work against Germany for a foreign power’s service aimed at passing on facts, objects or knowledge, but it is drafted as a fallback: its penalty applies only where the act is not already punishable under section 94 or section 96(1), among other provisions. All of them depend on section 93’s definition of a state secret, which is not a classification stamp. It covers facts, objects or knowledge accessible only to a limited circle that must be kept from a foreign power to avert the danger of serious disadvantage to Germany’s external security. The statement describes the documents as frequently classified. Whether they meet the section 93 test is a separate question.

The citation against Manfred D. carries one more clause. It lists section 94(2), number 1, the provision on especially serious cases, which carries life imprisonment or no less than five years and which, the statute says, applies as a rule where the offender abuses a responsible position that places him under a special duty to protect state secrets. That clause does not appear in the citation against Hanning. He left the BND in 2005 and, according to the statement, served as a state secretary at the Interior Ministry from December 2005 to November 2009, months before the arrangement is said to have begun. Manfred D. followed him there as an assistant on secondment.

Where the case came from

The case started in another investigation. The statement says it goes back to material found when Hamburg prosecutors searched Hanning’s property in September 2025, in their investigation of Christina Block and others, and that the file was passed to the federal prosecutor at the beginning of May 2026. Block, an heir to the Block House steakhouse chain, is on trial in Hamburg over the seizure of her children from her former husband in Denmark; she denies the charges, and Hanning denies the allegations against him in that case, the Guardian reported. State criminal police officers reportedly found an electronic storage device holding recent BND documents, the BBC reported. The federal investigation is being run with the BND itself and the Federal Criminal Police Office.

Marc Henrichmann, who chairs the Bundestag’s intelligence oversight committee, told AFP that Germany “will not tolerate the betrayal of secrets”, Al Jazeera reported. “This is a hard-hitting and deeply troubling story,” said Konstantin von Notz, a Green member of the committee, AP reported. He also called for barring former officials with security clearances from private consulting work after they leave office, Spiegel Online reported.

The next step is set out in the statement. Both men are to be brought before the investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice on Tuesday and Wednesday, who will read them the warrants and decide whether they are held in custody pending trial. Any charges would come later, in an indictment. Both men are presumed innocent. None of the reports read carried a response to the allegations from either man or from a lawyer for either; AP reported that a message to the BND seeking comment was not immediately returned.

Sources

The federal prosecutor’s press release of 6 October 2026 was read in German on generalbundesanwalt.de; facts about the warrants, dates, offices, places and the origin of the case are from it, and paraphrases of it are this publication’s. The two passages quoted in English are AP’s translation as carried by NPR, checked against the German. Sections 22, 93, 94, 96 and 99 of the Criminal Code were read in German on gesetze-im-internet.de and are translated here. Hanning’s age and the place of his arrest are as reported by the Guardian, the BBC and DW, which cite German broadcasters and the Süddeutsche Zeitung; AP and Al Jazeera placed his arrest in Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen, and the release does not settle it. The Block case is as reported by the Guardian and the BBC; Henrichmann’s remark is via AFP as reported by Al Jazeera and DW, von Notz’s remark and proposal as reported by AP, citing Spiegel Online. The warrants themselves were not read.