Germany’s foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%-90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic was by accident released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, two German newspapers reported on Wednesday.
In accordance with a joint report by publications Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, Germany’s spying agency BND had indications that the institute had conducted gain-of-function experiments, whereby viruses are modified to change into more transmissible to humans for research purposes.
It also had indications that quite a few violations of safety regulations had occurred on the lab, the papers said.
The spy agency assessment’s was based on an unspecified intelligence operation code-named “Saaremaa” in addition to on publicly-available data. It had been commissioned by the office of Germany’s chancellor on the time, Angela Merkel, but never published, the report said.
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BND declined to comment. When asked concerning the report in a press conference, outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz also declined to comment on Wednesday.
The papers reported that the assessment was, nevertheless, shared with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency within the autumn of 2024.
A CIA spokesperson said in January that the CIA has assessed that the COVID-19 pandemic is more prone to have emerged from a lab than from nature.
The CIA said on the time it had “low confidence” in its assessment and that each scenarios – lab origin and natural origin – remain plausible.
China’s government says it supports and has taken part in research to find out COVID-19’s origin, and has accused Washington of politicizing the matter, especially due to efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to research.
Beijing has said there was no credibility to claims that a laboratory leak likely caused the pandemic.
China’s foreign ministry said last month that the Wuhan Institute of Virology never carried out any gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and that it was not involved within the creation or leakage of the COVID-19 virus.
(Reporting by Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt and Andreas Rinke in Berlin, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
