German charged with espionage
Berlin, Feb. 25: A German man has been charged with espionage for allegedly passing information on properties used by the German parliament to Russian military intelligence, prosecutors said Thursday.
The suspect, identified only as Jens F. in line with German privacy rules, worked for a company that had been repeatedly contracted to check portable electrical appliances by the Bundestag, or the lower house of parliament, federal prosecutors said in a statement. As a result of that, he had access to PDF files with floor plans of the properties involved. Prosecutors said, at some point before early September 2017, the suspect “decided of his own accord” to give information on the properties to Russian intelligence.
They said he sent the PDF files to an employee of the Russian Embassy in Berlin who was an officer with Russia's GRU military intelligence agency. They didn't specify how his activities came to light. The charges against the suspect, who is not in custody, were filed at a Berlin court on February 12. The court will have to decide whether to go ahead with a trial.
Relations between Germany and Russia have been buffeted by a growing list of issues in recent years. In October, the European Union imposed sanctions on two Russian officials and part of the GRU agency over a cyberattack against the German parliament in 2015. In addition, a Russian man accused of killing a Georgian man in downtown Berlin on Moscow's orders in 2019 is on trial in Berlin. And last year's poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, flown to Germany for treatment and then arrested immediately after he returned to Russia, has added another layer of tensions.
Bank credit growth on a yearon-year basis improved to 6.2 per cent in the December quarter from 5.8 per cent in the previous three-month period, RBI data showed. However, credit growth in the third quarter of the current fiscal was lower when compared to 7.4 per cent growth recorded a year ago. Growth in credit by private sector banks decelerated considerably to 6.7 per cent in the quarter ended December 2020 as against 13.1 per cent a year ago. Advances growth in PSBs improved to 6.5 per cent in December 2020 quarter as against 3.7 per cent in same period of 2019, data showed.
Patiala: Sprinter Dutee Chand blazed the track to win the women’s 100m in the Indian Grand Prix II athletics at the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports campus on Thursday. Dutee won in 11.44 seconds, an
improvement on the 11.51 seconds she had clocked last week in the first GP. She is hoping to qualify for the Olympic Games
by meeting the 11.15 seconds standard. She can also qualify as one of the 56 starters in the Tokyo Games on the basis of her rankings. She is world No.
33 at the moment. Meanwhile, star Indian sprinter Hima Das ran her first competitive race in more than a year and won a gold in the women’s
200m in 23.31 seconds. Hima, who is yet to qualify for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, had run her last competitive race in August 2019. She had suffered a lower back injury at the 2018 Asian Games and that forced her to miss the World Championships in Doha in
September 2019. —