On New Year’s Eve in 2023, on the Danish side of the border with Germany, two children stood near their father’s house watching fireworks. The boy was ten, his sister thirteen. A team of masked men in black stormed the house, beat the father to the ground, and took the two children. One of them pressed a distress button that summoned Danish police, who tracked the group as it moved on foot toward the border. When the children cried out, their captors taped their mouths. After thirty-five minutes they crossed into Germany and drove eight hundred kilometers south, and two days later the mother collected them at her home in Hamburg. The men who did this were not relatives and not street criminals. They were hired professionals, and somewhere there was a price.
The capabilities used that night, the watching, the fabrication of evidence, the seizure of a person and their removal across a frontier, once belonged to states alone. They have moved into private companies that sell them to private buyers, and the firms at the center of this case are Israeli, staffed by veterans of the country’s intelligence services. Reaching that market is not a matter of walking in off the street. It runs through insiders, the retired officers and officials who know which company does what, and in this instance the alleged broker was a former chief of German intelligence and the alleged organizer a former head of an Israeli security service. That is what should trouble a reader who will never meet a spy. The instruments of the state are available for purchase, and the people selling and brokering them are the same people who once wielded them on the public’s behalf.
Christina Block, 52, owns eight percent of the company her father built from a German steakhouse chain, and is worth hundreds of millions of euros. She married Stephan Hensel in 2005 and divorced him in 2014, and a long custody war followed over their two youngest children. German courts first granted custody to the father, then on appeal to Block. Denmark, where Hensel had settled with the children and which is the one European Union country not obliged to recognize another member state’s custody rulings, held its own hearings and decided the children would stay with him. By the account German prosecutors have put before the Hamburg court, the effort to get them back began in 2021 with Block’s partner, the sports journalist Gerhard Delling, and an early attempt to smear the father and his lawyer as pedophiles, which failed.
What the prosecution describes next is an escalation, and the exact wording matters. By spring 2023, prosecutors say, Block allegedly turned to an Israeli company called Cyber Cúpula Operations, which the same reporting describes as previously employed by the family for cyber protection, and asked its staff to “rescue” the children. Der Spiegel’s reporting puts the earlier retainer the same way, hedged, with the firm said to have been engaged by the Block business for information security. Prosecutors also say Block had earlier hired the same firm to smear her ex-husband, and German prosecutors allege a further attempt to frame him by planting a hard drive loaded with child-abuse material. Each of these is an allegation within the prosecution’s case rather than a finding, and every defendant denies involvement.
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