Germany arrests ex-BND chief August Hanning on suspicion of trading state secrets

German federal prosecutors arrested August Hanning on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, on suspicion of treasonous espionage, of spying out state secrets, and of attempted treason. Hanning led the Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, from 1998 to 2005. He was taken into custody at his home in Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen, in southern Germany. A former aide, identified under German privacy rules only as Manfred D., was arrested the same day in Steinfurt, in the west of the country. Premises linked to both men were searched.

The prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe says the two men agreed in 2010 that Manfred D. would keep passing valuable intelligence from inside the BND to Hanning, in exchange for payment. The office puts the volume at about 2,000 documents, many of them classified, and says the flow continued until June 2022. Hanning, prosecutors allege, used the material in private consulting work. Manfred D. is accused of aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage. He was Hanning's chief of staff and later chief of staff to several BND presidents, from 2012 until 2026, which is the access the charge depends on.

Spokesperson Ines Peterson told the broadcaster RTL that in one instance Hanning is suspected of using classified information to prepare an analysis for an employee of a foreign intelligence service. In another, she said, he is alleged to have passed information after a long exchange with an employee of a different foreign service. Neither Peterson nor the prosecutor's office named the services. The BND did not comment.

The arrest sits on top of a separate case that has already put Hanning in the German press. He has been looked at over the abduction, in January 2024, of the children of Hamburg businesswoman Christina Block from her former husband in Denmark, during a custody fight. Prosecutors have suspected that Hanning, as an executive of a security firm, accepted a contract from Block in 2022 to abduct the children, alongside a retired official of the Hamburg state criminal police. The public prosecutor's office announced that investigation in the autumn of 2025, according to the German agency dpa. The Block family runs the Block House steakhouse chain. The custody trial drew heavy coverage. Tuesday's searches covered the espionage allegation. Hanning's home had already been searched in the abduction inquiry.

Konstantin von Notz, a Green member of the Bundestag, told Spiegel Online that the allegations were hard-hitting and deeply troubling, and that he expected a swift investigation. He said his party had criticised the lobbying work of former officials with high clearances for years, and he called for a ban on private consulting by former officials who still hold security clearances. That is a policy argument. The charge is narrower: payment for documents, and the alleged handoff of analysis to foreign intelligence employees.

A former BND president has not been arrested on an espionage suspicion in the history of the service as it is usually told. The 2,000-document figure, if it holds in court, is not a single leak. It is a twelve-year arrangement, on the prosecutor's timeline, running from 2010 to June 2022, and covering the years in which Manfred D. sat in the chief of staff's office under more than one president. The foreign services are the missing names. Until Peterson or a charge sheet supplies them, the public case is the volume of paper, the payment, and the consulting use, plus a second, older suspicion about a child abduction in Denmark that has not been folded into Tuesday's espionage count.