The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office confirmed this Saturday the arrest of a Canadian woman of Chinese origin who was interning at NATO’s strategic military headquarters (SHAPE), located in Mons, southwest of Belgium. The woman, who was remanded in custody on Friday, is being investigated for espionage on behalf of a third country and for participation in a criminal organization, according to the brief statement released by the Public Ministry, which has not revealed her identity or the country for which she allegedly worked.
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The investigation began within the base itself. SHAPE’s security services noticed behavior that did not fit the intern’s assigned duties and reported their suspicions to the General Intelligence and Security Service, the Belgian military intelligence branch.
A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor’s office explained to the Flemish public television VRT that security officials had detected that the woman had been accessing computer systems and making inquiries about files that were outside her remit. As it was an alleged case of espionage, an exclusive competence of the federal prosecutor’s office in Belgium, the case immediately passed into the hands of the Charleroi judicial police, who searched both the suspect’s home and her workplace within the military facilities.
A SHAPE spokesman assured that there are no indications that the episode has affected the Alliance’s operational availability, its command and control mechanisms, or ongoing tasks, and that the base continues to operate without interruption. The supreme headquarters in Mons is a particularly sensitive location; it is the seat of Allied Command Operations, the body responsible for planning and executing all missions of an alliance that today comprises 32 countries.
The arrest comes at a time when cases detected by European counterintelligence services have increased, reporting a constant trickle of infiltration, sabotage, and recruitment attempts linked mainly to Russia. In this case, however, the Belgian prosecutor’s office has not pointed to any country as responsible.
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In February, a Polish Ministry of Defense official with decades of service was arrested inside the ministerial building in Warsaw, suspected of collaborating with Russian and Belarusian intelligence services, after months of surveillance by Polish Military Counterintelligence.
At the end of May, the German prosecutor’s office charged three people for allegedly spying for Russia on a veteran who had fought alongside Ukrainian forces, while a Bavarian court opened a trial against three other people allegedly recruited by Moscow to commit sabotage on German territory.
That same month, Germany and Switzerland separately arrested Ukrainian citizens suspected of having attempted to send packages with explosives following instructions from Russian intelligence.
Warsaw has estimated that more than thirty people have been arrested since the start of the invasion of Ukraine for alleged collaboration with Moscow in sabotage and arson, in addition to a cyberattack attributed to Russian military intelligence against dozens of the country’s power grid facilities.
