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Germany’s former foreign intelligence chief was accused of being a Russian spy before his arrest on suspicion of treason earlier this week.

August Hanning, 80, was arrested on Tuesday after being accused of passing highly classified information to a foreign intelligence agency in what would amount to Germany’s worst post-war spy scandal.

Weeks before his arrest, Mr Hanning, who ran the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1998 to 2005, sent an angry letter to the current head of the agency, demanding answers about an investigation into him.

In the letter, dated Aug 17, Mr Hanning asked Martin Jäger 11 questions about why the BND had forwarded a dossier containing allegations about him to an investigative authority without consulting him.

The dossier contained allegations by a former intelligence agent who had called Mr Hanning a Russian spy. Mr Jäger did not respond to the letter at the time.

‘Close contact’ with former Chinese general

Mr Hanning has also been accused of remaining in “close contact” with a Chinese former army general.

He is said to have passed him confidential “political information” partly based on the BND files over several years.

The German public prosecutor’s office claims Mr Hanning maintained contact for several years with “a representative of another foreign intelligence service”, named by Der Spiegel as Wang Jianzheng.

Mr Wang, who works at the military-aligned China Institute for International Strategic Studies, spent 23 years as a military diplomat in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

He was first posted to East Berlin from 1987 to 1990 and returned twice after its reunification, most recently from 2009 to 2013.

Mr Hanning appears to have met Mr Wang – considered one of the foremost experts on Germany in China – at conferences and the latter thanked him for his “hints and explanations” in the foreword to a book published in 2007.

The pair also sat on a board of advisers for a German-Chinese eco park in Qingdao, a port city in eastern China.

Investigators believe Mr Hanning obtained secret information from the BND for years after finishing his career in the civil service, and passed it on while working as a commercial consultant.

It is alleged he received information from Manfred Dankesreiter, 64, his former chief of staff.

Mr Dankesreiter is suspected of passing on around 2,000 documents in return for payment, including classified files such as briefing papers for the BND’s leadership before weekly intelligence briefings in the chancellery – meetings during which important world issues such as the Ukraine war and Iran’s nuclear programme are discussed.

It has also been reported that investigators suspect Mr Hanning of supplying information to Azerbaijan’s intelligence service.

Mr Hanning appeared on the participant list of a human rights forum in Baku in 2011, and later became a board member of the German-Azerbaijani Forum, a lobbying association.

His lawyer has denied the allegations against his client. He told Der Spiegel that, while Mr Hanning had confidential documents, it was untrue he passed on “information to the detriment of the Federal Republic of Germany”, let alone in return for payment.