German spy agency 'believed Covid likely started in lab'

Germany's foreign intelligence service believed there was a 80-90% chance that coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, German media say.

Two German newspapers say they have uncovered details of an assessment carried out by spy agency BND in 2020 but never published.

The intelligence service had indications that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been carrying out experiments where viruses are modified to become more transmissible to humans for research, they say.

China repeated its denial saying the cause "should be determined by scientists" - and pointed to a World Health Organization investigation which found the lab-leak theory was "extremely unlikely".

There is no consensus on the cause of the Covid pandemic.

The lab leak hypothesis has been hotly contested by scientists, including many who say there is no definitive evidence to back it up.

But the once controversial theory has been gaining ground among some intelligence agencies - and the BND is the latest to entertain the theory. In January, the US CIA said the coronavirus was "more likely" to have leaked from a lab than to have come from animals.

According to Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, the BND met in Berlin in 2020 to look into the origin of coronavirus in an operation called Project Saaremaa.

It assessed the lab theory as "likely", although it did not have definitive proof.

The BND also found indications that several violations of safety regulations had occurred at the lab.

The assessment was commissioned by the office of Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor at the time, but was never publicly known of until now.

According to the papers, the findings were shared with the CIA in autumn of last year.

In January this year, the CIA said that a "research-related origin" of the pandemic was more likely than a natural origin "based on the available body of reporting" - although it cautioned it had "low confidence" in this determination.

Both the BND and outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz declined to comment.

China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in response: "We believe that tracing the origin of Covid-19 is a scientific issue that should be determined by scientists with a scientific approach.

"The conclusion that a laboratory leak is extremely unlikely was reached by the China-WHO joint expert team after on-site visits to relevant labs in Wuhan and in-depth discussions with researchers.

"This authoritative scientific conclusion has been widely recognised by the international community and the scientific community.

"China firmly opposes any form of political manipulation on the issue of Covid-19 origin tracing."

The WHO investigation in early 2021 saw a team of scientists fly to Wuhan on a mission to look into the source of the pandemic.

After spending 12 days there, which included a visit to the laboratory, the team concluded the lab-leak theory was "extremely unlikely".

But many have since questioned their findings, with one prominent group of scientists criticising the WHO report for not taking the lab-leak theory seriously enough - it was dismissed in a few pages of a several-hundred-page report.

Supporters of the natural origin hypothesis - which was backed in the WHO report - say Covid-19 emerged in bats and then jumped to humans, most likely through another animal, or "intermediary host".

This hypothesis was widely accepted at the start of the pandemic, but as time has worn on, scientists have not found a virus in either bats or another animal that matches the genetic make-up of Covid-19, leading some to doubt the theory.