A FORMER German spy has been sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of sharing classified information with his gay lover.
The security leak surrounding the 43-year-old former lieutenant colonel identified only as Anton K came to light after a tip-off from his wife.
Yesterday’s sentence ends a five-year case that became a dream story for the country’s tabloids and a huge embarrassment for Germany’s secret service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).
In 2005 the BND agent left behind his wife and children in southern Germany to work as a diplomat and BND agent in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. His job there was to build up local contacts and file classified reports. One day he was approached on the street in Pristina by Murat Afrim, a Macedonian-Albanian shop assistant in his mid-20s who had grown up in Germany and spoke German fluently.
With BND permission, Anton hired Murat as a translator and fixer. Some time later the two men began an intimate relationship and Murat moved into Anton’s Pristina apartment – of which the BND knew nothing.
In 2007, Anton’s wife complained to the BND that her husband was having an affair with his translator and he had replaced her name with Afrim’s as beneficiary of his life insurance policy.
The BND launched an investigation and claims Afrim, now 29, had access to classified information. The state prosecutor claimed Afrim passed on this knowledge to organised criminals and local intelligence services in Pristina, a claim prosecutors were unable to prove during the six-month trial.
In addition, the prosecutor claims the two men defrauded the agency of €14,700 in bogus expense claims.
In its verdict, the court said the agent was guilty of showing his partner an organigram of extremist organisations in Kosovo marked “secret” and revealing to him names of BND officials with whom he had contact.
Afrim received a 14-month suspended sentence for his role in the affair.
The two men were arrested in March 2008, released due to lack of evidence and arrested again last year. A lawyer for the two men said they would appeal the verdict, saying the case was part of a homophobic campaign against the couple, who now live near Stuttgart. The former spy described yesterday’s verdict as “political”. “We didn’t betray the state, the state betrayed us,” he said.
