Monday, November 1st, 2021
Mole blown in Berlin?
Justice employee is said to have warned Hildmann
Investigations are underway against a former employee from the IT department of the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office. The 32-year-old is suspected of having betrayed Attila Hildmann’s official secrets. She may also pass information on to other conspiracy ideologues.
According to media reports, there was apparently a mole in the Berlin judiciary during the investigation against the conspiracy ideologist Attila Hildmann. According to research by ARD and “Spiegel”, a former employee of the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office is suspected of having passed information on to the accused Hildmann. Among other things, she is said to have informed him that there was an arrest warrant against him.
According to information from the ARD political magazine Kontraste and the research format STRG_F, which the NDR produces, it is 32-year-old M. from Berlin. Among other things, she is said to have accessed documents relating to the investigation against Hildmann. A spokesman for the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed on request that a former employee from the agency’s IT department was being investigated on suspicion of breaching official secrecy and attempting to thwart punishment. The employee was therefore terminated without notice.
According to the reports, the attorney general’s office got on the trail of employee M. by the fact that the 32-year-old is said to have been noticed several times during police operations. Among other things, the police identified M. in the vicinity of an activist in the lateral thinker scene. The public prosecutor’s office then checked in May what data the system administrator at the time had accessed, said spokesman Martin Steltner, according to the information. “There were unjustified inquiries about various people from the right-wing extremist and the lateral thinker scene,” said Steltner. As a result, suspect M.’s apartment in Berlin was searched in July and data carriers were seized.
In addition to passing on data, the accused is said to have visited Hildmann, who was wanted in Germany, in Turkey at the beginning of the year. This is what a former companion of Hildmann, Kai Enderes, claims in an interview with Kontraste and STRG_F. The judicial employee M. had also passed the arrest warrant on to Hildmann, said Enderes accordingly.
According to the ARD reports, the public prosecutor’s office does not assume that the disclosure of the information was the cause of Hildmann’s flight, as Hildmann had already left before the arrest warrant was issued. Steltner said that the transfer had “only given Hildmann retrospective certainty about the actual existence of an arrest warrant”.
Justice wants to draw conclusions
According to the reports, the judiciary now wants to draw conclusions from the data scandal in the attorney general’s office. In the future, it should be recorded more comprehensively who accessed which documents and when. In addition, the law enforcement agency is examining how data in sensitive investigations can be better protected against unauthorized access, said a spokesman for the Berlin judicial administration on request.
According to the research, the former judicial employee M. did not want to comment on the allegations. Hildmann, who gave Kontraste and STRG_F an interview according to their information, did not want to comment on the specific allegations.
Criminal proceedings have been ongoing against Hildmann since last year for numerous offenses, including sedition and resistance to law enforcement officers. Hildmann, who has German and Turkish citizenship, is said to be currently in Turkey. Turkey does not extradite Turkish nationals.