German spy agency concluded COVID virus likely leaked from lab, papers say

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany's foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%-90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, two German newspapers reported on Wednesday.

According to 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 become more transmissible to humans for research purposes.

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

The spy agency assessment's 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 at the time, Angela Merkel, but never published, the report said.

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

The papers reported that the assessment was, however, shared with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the autumn of 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 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.

(Reporting by Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt and Andreas Rinke in Berlin, Editing by Angus MacSwan)