Jörg Dornau Detained in Germany. Political Prisoners Worked on His Onion Farm

Jörg Dornau, a deputy from the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, was detained today during a session of the Saxony state parliament. Police officers escorted him to a separate room for questioning, Bild reported.

Earlier today, at the request of the prosecutor’s office, the state parliament voted to lift Dornau’s parliamentary immunity.

Searches are being conducted on the basis of an order issued by the Leipzig district court as part of a prosecutor’s investigation into suspected sanctions evasion. The case concerns the delivery of a loader to elarus using a “false transit” scheme in 2022.

“The suspect is accused of having stated Kazakhstan as the destination country of a telescopic loader in a customs declaration in August 2022, which did not correspond to reality, in order to conceal the ban on exports to Belarus — the actual country of destination of the vehicle — by using transit states. Subsequently, the vehicle was indeed exported to Belarus,” the prosecutor’s office said in a press release.

The prosecutor’s office уточнили that searches are not being carried out in the premises of the state parliament or parliamentary factions.

As a reminder, the Saxon deputy from the populist Alternative for Germany party became widely known after it emerged that he was using the labor of political prisoners on his onion farm Tsybulka-Bel in Belarus. In 2024, the Leipzig prosecutor’s office refused to open a criminal case against Dornau in connection with the use of political prisoners on the farm, but the presidium of the Saxony state parliament fined him 20,000 euros for failing to inform the German authorities about his business in Belarus.