Investigations against Hildmann: public prosecutor’s office exposes spies

By Julian Feldmann and Nino Seidel, NDR, as well as Susett Kleine and Daniel Laufer, rbb

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An employee of the Berlin judiciary is suspected of having passed on data from the authority to the conspiracy ideologist and anti-Semite Attila Hildmann. Criminal proceedings have been ongoing against Hildmann since last year for numerous offenses, including sedition and resistance to law enforcement officers. Hildmann is said to be currently in Turkey.

Since February, the authorities have been looking for the author of vegan cookbooks with an arrest warrant for his escape. The fact that such an arrest warrant had been issued against Hildmann was first made known through a right-wing internet platform that was apparently operated from Hildmann’s closest circle. Hildmann himself is said to have received the document.

Suspect terminated without notice

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 confidentiality and attempting to prevent punishment. According to the authorities, the employee was given notice without notice.

According to information from ARD-Politikmagazins Contrast and the search format STRG_F, that the Ed for funk produced, the former employee of the public prosecutor’s office is 32-year-old M. from Berlin. She is said to have visited Hildmann in Turkey earlier this year. This is what a former companion of Hildmann, Kai Enderes, claims in an interview with Contrasts and STRG_F. M. also passed the arrest warrant on to Hildmann, claims Enderes.

According to its own information, Enderes supported Hildmann from summer 2020 to the middle of this year, mainly in technical matters, such as setting up channels on the Telegram messenger service. Hildmann spreads his conspiracy stories and anti-Semitic propaganda primarily via Telegram. Hildmann is being investigated for a large number of incitatory acts.

The police noticed in the “lateral thinking” environment

The public prosecutor’s office got on the trail of employee M. when the 32-year-old is said to have been noticed several times during police operations. Among other things, the police found M. in the vicinity of an activist of the lateral thinker scene. As a result, the attorney general checked in May which data the system administrator at the time had recently accessed, says spokesman Martin Steltner on request. “There were unjustified inquiries about various people from the right-wing extremist and lateral thinker scene,” said Steltner. As a result, suspect M.’s apartment in Berlin was searched in July and data carriers were seized.

M. is also said to have accessed documents relating to the investigation against Hildmann. According to the current state of the investigation, there is a suspicion that the suspect “may have passed on the data requested to the suspect Hildmann,” said Steltner, spokesman for the authorities.

Hildmann fled even before the arrest warrant

Due to Hildmann’s early departure, even before the arrest warrant was issued, the Public Prosecutor’s Office does not assume that the disclosure of the information was the cause of Hildmann’s flight. This would have given Hildmann “only retrospectively certainty about the actual existence of an arrest warrant,” says Steltner. This is also confirmed by the former Hildmann confidante Enderes. He had already left Germany with Hildmann at the end of 2020 – on the basis of a presumption that an arrest might soon be made.

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 the data in sensitive investigative proceedings can be better protected from unauthorized access, says a spokesman for the Berlin judicial administration.

The former judicial employee M. did not want to comment on the allegations. Hildmann himself also expressed himself in an interview with STRG_F and Contrasts not to the allegations against M. Hildmann admitted to the investigation against himself that he had made criminal statements as sedition. Hildmann announced that he would not return to the Federal Republic of Germany.