German spy agency says Covid-19 likely leaked from China's Wuhan Institute

Beijing has said there was no credibility to claims that a laboratory leak likely caused the pandemic.

Germany's foreign intelligence service believes that there is a 80%-90% likelihood that the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China's Wuhan Institute, two local German newspapers reported on March 12.

The spy agency's assessment was based on an unspecified intelligence operation code-named "Saaremaa" as well as on publicly-available data.

It had been commissioned by the office of Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, in 2020 but never published, the report said.

BND declined to comment to news agency Reuters. When asked about the report in a press conference, outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz also declined to comment.

What does the report say?

According to a joint report by German publications Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, the spying agency BND had indications that the institute had conducted gain-of-function experiments, whereby viruses are modified to become more transmissible to humans for research purposes.

It also had indications that numerous violations of safety regulations had occurred at the lab, the newspapers reported.

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CIA's involvement

The papers reported that the assessment was shared with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 2024.

A CIA spokesperson said in January that the CIA has assessed that the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely to have emerged from a lab than from nature.

The CIA said at the time it had "low confidence" in its assessment and that both scenarios – lab origin and natural origin – remain plausible.

China's stance

China’s government says it supports and has taken part in research to determine COVID-19’s origin, and has accused Washington of politicizing the matter, especially because of efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate.

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 in the creation or leakage of the COVID-19 virus.

With agency inputs