In a dramatic development that has shaken Germany, a police search in a Hamburg child-abduction case has ended, a year later, with the arrest of Germany’s former spy chief. On October 6, 2026, August Hanning, who headed the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, from 1998 to 2005, was arrested at his home in North Rhine-Westphalia. The federal prosecutor accuses him of spying out state secrets, attempted treason and working as an agent for a foreign intelligence service. Prosecutors said the case stems from material found when Hamburg prosecutors searched Hanning’s premises in September 2025 during a kidnapping investigation. Police found top-secret BND documents on an electronic storage device.
The federal prosecutor’s office accuses Hanning (80) of buying classified state secrets from his former chief of staff. No former official of his stature has faced such allegations in Germany. After leaving the BND, Hanning served as state secretary in the Federal Interior Ministry, then became a private security consultant.
Hanning, a non-partisan lawyer with a doctorate, became BND president in December 1998 under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and oversaw the agency’s move to Berlin. His tenure included the “Curveball” affair, in which false claims from an Iraqi source about mobile bioweapons labs were later cited by the US in its case for the Iraq war. Hanning had told the CIA that the claims could not be confirmed. He was also criticised over Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national raised in Germany, who stayed at Guantánamo until 2006 after Hanning opposed accepting a US offer to release him. From 2005 to 2009 he was state secretary at the Interior Ministry under Wolfgang Schäuble.
Prosecutors say that his source was Manfred D. (surname withheld), who was chief of staff under Hanning’s successors from March 2012 to March 2026. Manfred allegedly passed nearly 2,000 BND documents, some highly sensitive, to Hanning over several years in return for money. Hanning allegedly used the material in his consultancy business.
Hanning has denied involvement in the kidnapping. His lawyer, Leon Kruse, has called the allegations false. The most serious charge is that Hanning kept close contact for years with an employee of a foreign intelligence service and leaked classified information to him. Investigators also cited an analysis that he allegedly prepared for an employee of another foreign service, though it is unclear whether it ever reached that person.
The material Hanning reportedly transmitted covered regular meetings of German security chiefs at the chancellery, including the Iranian nuclear programme and assessments of Russia’s armed forces. Some of it reportedly came from partner agencies abroad, which could damage their trust in the BND and complicate future intelligence cooperation with Germany.
The kidnapping case
The breakthrough came in September 2025, when Hamburg state police searched Hanning’s home and offices in a separate case. They were investigating Christina Block, heiress to the Block House steakhouse chain. Block’s two youngest children were taken from their father’s care in Denmark on New Year’s Eve 2023/24 and brought to Germany. The father had kept them after a weekend visit in August 2021, which prosecutors say was unlawful. Hamburg prosecutors accuse Block of ordering the abduction during the custody dispute.
They say Hanning and a retired Hamburg police officer, as heads of a security firm, accepted a commission from Block and were paid more than €100,000. They allegedly planned a failed abduction attempt in 2022, a little over a year before the children were taken. Prosecutors are also examining whether the pair took part in the 2023 abduction and whether they plotted with Block and an Israeli security firm to discredit her ex-husband and his lawyer with false paedophilia allegations. Searches at 13 addresses, including in Switzerland, were carried out in September 2025. The Hamburg trial has seven defendants, and Hanning is not among them. He was called as a witness and declined to testify.
The search turned up the storage device with the BND documents. Police handed it to the federal prosecutor, who opened a covert investigation against Hanning and Manfred in May 2026. The most recent documents found so far date from June 2022.
BND President Martin Jäger said the agency’s own early internal investigations had corroborated the suspicions and that there could be “no compromises” on internal security.
The case has spawned sharp political reactions. Günter Krings of the ruling Christian Democratic Union said that even the suspicion damages trust in the security agencies. Konstantin von Notz of the Green Party, deputy chair of the parliamentary body overseeing the intelligence services, called for tighter scrutiny of lobbying by former top officials with the highest clearances, describing it as a gateway for hostile services. Clara Bünger of the Left Party said the case showed the intelligence services were a security risk in themselves.
However, Hanning’s is not the first episode where the BND saw a betrayal. In the 1960s, Heinz Felfe ran its Soviet counterintelligence division while working for the KGB. A BND employee exposed in 2014 was sentenced in 2016 to eight years for spying mainly for the CIA. In December 2022 the BND arrested Carsten L., a senior employee, on suspicion of passing information to Russia’s FSB, and he later stood trial in Berlin. The BND had been alerted by a foreign partner service that its internal documents had surfaced in Russia. Then-chief Bruno Kahl said that the damage was limited and that none of the material came from other agencies. Partner-supplied material is exactly what Hanning is now alleged to have passed on.
Questions Galore
The central question, who received the information, remains unanswered. Prosecutors have not named the foreign services involved. German media, citing law enforcement sources, report that Russia is not suspected. However, a report by the Russian state-funded outlet RT, headlined “Mossad-linked ex-German spy chief arrested for treason”, points in a different direction. It says the Block case is where Hanning’s Israeli connections emerged.
The report cites the prosecution’s allegation that Block hired Hanning’s firm, System 360, and former state police officer Thorsten Mehles to bring the children back from Denmark. After that attempt failed, Hanning allegedly contracted the job to Yaakov Peri, former head of Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet, who now runs a private intelligence firm, CGI Group. Peri reportedly assembled the team that assaulted Block’s ex-husband and took the children. Block is on trial in Hamburg on kidnapping charges.
The report adds that Hanning is also claimed to have recruited Danny Yatom, a former Mossad chief. Yatom told Israeli media that he knew Hanning in the late 1980s but had “no connection to this case.” It notes that Hanning himself told Israeli media in 2021 that he kept “very close working relationships, even friendships” with Yatom and other Mossad officials long after leaving the BND. However, the RT report does not say that German prosecutors have identified Mossad or any Israeli service as the recipient of the leaked material, and no German authority has publicly done so.
