BERLIN (Reuters) – German security authorities believe that China is still conducting police activities on German soil even though Beijing assured Berlin in February that it had ceased to do so, the German foreign and interior ministries said on Monday.
“The security authorities continue to assume that there are two so-called overseas police stations in Germany,” a spokesperson for the interior ministry said at a regular press conference.
Berlin called on Beijing in November to shut down extraterritorial police stations in the country.
“The Chinese side got back to us at the beginning of February and said that these so-called ‘service stations’, as the Chinese side called them, had been closed,” a foreign ministry spokesperson said, adding that Berlin was still in talks with Beijing to resolve the issue.
The interior ministry spokesperson clarified that the police stations in question were “not fixed-location offices, but mobile facilities” from which Chinese and non-Chinese nationals were conducting “official duties” on behalf of Beijing.
The Chinese Embassy in Berlin did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Germany is reassessing its bilateral relations with China amid increased wariness of Beijing as a strategic rival even as it remains Berlin’s largest trading partner.
(Reporting by Friederike Heine; Editing by Matthias Williams, Rachel More and Bernadette Baum)
