Just after midnight on New Year’s Day 2024, a man and his two children stood near the harbor in the Danish town of Gråsten, watching fireworks over the water a short walk from the house where the children had been living. A witness later told a court in Hamburg that several gray cars had drawn up near the quay in the last minutes of the old year, and that around a quarter past midnight masked men rushed the family and knocked the father, then forty-nine, to the ground. The same witness described one child being loaded into a car while the other fought back, held by two men who carried it by the limbs. The six attackers dragged the children through forest and mud, and both feared for their lives. One of them managed to press an alarm button that Danish police had issued the family after an earlier scare, and cried out into a night where officers were already searching with dogs and flashlights.
It did them no good. By the time the vehicles reached the German frontier the children had been moved to a camper van bought for the operation, and the men had taped the ten-year-old boy’s mouth and bound his thirteen-year-old sister’s hands. One of the kidnappers, an Israeli, told the children to keep quiet or be killed. They were carried more than eight hundred kilometers south to a farm in Baden-Württemberg and held in a mobile home until their mother arrived to collect them and take them to Hamburg.
The mother is Christina Block, heiress to the Hamburg steakhouse dynasty built on the Block House and Jim Block chains, a group of nearly eighty restaurants and a five-star hotel, with several food producers besides, employing some 2,400 people. She is on trial in Hamburg, charged with aggravated child abduction, grievous bodily harm and unlawful detention, facing up to ten years, alongside her partner, the former television sports presenter Gerhard Delling, accused of helping her. She denies all of it.
The men she is accused of hiring were not ordinary criminals. The prosecution’s case and the testimony of the operatives themselves describe an operation brokered by the former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service and carried out by veterans of Israel’s. The skills used to seize two children on a Danish quay were the skills of the state, available for a fee.
The war that produced that night had been running for a decade. Christina Block met Stephan Hensel through friends in 1999 and married him in 2005, and they had four children. Hensel had trained as a banker and gone to work inside the Block business, moving into the meat trade, and then, as happens to executives who fall out of favor in the family’s world, he lost the job. He blames the dismissal on the patriarch Eugen Block and holds it responsible for the collapse of the marriage. They separated in 2014 and divorced in 2018, and the fight moved to money and to the right to decide where the children would live.
It was the children who moved first. In early 2021 the eldest daughter left her mother and went to her father after a holiday on Sylt. That August, Hensel kept the two youngest in Denmark after what was meant to be an ordinary visit, telling the youth welfare office that Block beat the children, a charge she rejects as freely invented. She answered that Hensel had turned the children against her and was holding them away from her and the rest of the family. Hensel’s position was that the children lived with him by choice. A youth-office worker would later testify that his isolation of them looked like a demonstration of power.
On paper, the German courts sided with the mother. The Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg gave Block the authority to decide where the children lived and ordered Hensel to hand them back. He refused, and a Danish court had already granted him provisional custody, so Denmark declined to enforce the German order. In February 2023 a Danish court rejected the return of the children outright and left Block with a visitation right she could not exercise. “I still have no contact with my children, although I have a contact order,” she told Bild in late 2024.
The operation grew in this gap. Germany and Denmark run on separate legal systems, and Denmark sits outside the European framework that would have forced automatic recognition of the German ruling, leaving the matter to the slow machinery of the Hague Conventions. A German court had named Block the parent entitled to the children and could not deliver them across a border fifty kilometers from Hamburg. After two years of stalemate, German jurisdiction lapsed on the ground that the children had settled with their father, and the case passed to Denmark. A woman holding what a German court had called the right to decide where her own children lived watched the German state prove unable to enforce its own decision.
That failure is real, and it is the part of the story that the tabloid account of a monstrous heiress erases. It does not make what happened on the quay defensible, and the record does not let Block stand as a wronged innocent either. The children had run toward their father, not away from him. Her defense in court is that holding the German custody order, she could hardly have kidnapped her own children, and that she had been talking to the security firm only about an assignment for a family hotel. Against that sits her own phone, which investigators say held a diary of schemes to recover the children, from a hired makeup artist to a body double for the father’s new partner. She called it blue-sky thinking that kept her sane, and said she only drove south after someone told her to come quickly because it was about her children.
The money behind all of this sits inside a second family war that the coverage mostly leaves out. Block has been a shareholder in the Eugen Block holding company since 2011, yet she does not control the fortune, and she has been in open conflict with her own father over the succession, pushed at times out of the company’s management. Eugen Block, in his eighties and still the group’s dominant figure, told the Hamburger Abendblatt he had nothing to do with the abduction and could say nothing about it. The war over the children was being waged by a woman who had been sidelined inside her own family’s empire by the man who held its purse.
The operatives tell a story that begins long before the camper van. Block and Delling, by the Israeli side’s testimony, started looking for ways to retrieve the children in 2021. An early attempt to brand Hensel and his lawyer as pedophiles failed. Investigators drawing on the security firm’s own data found that in September 2023 there was an effort to plant incriminating material on Hensel, and the charge sheet carries the allegation that the firm was to place fabricated child-abuse material on him to break him in the custody courts. A security contractor is separately accused of watching Block’s Hamburg house so the children could not flee once they were brought there. By the time of the New Year’s operation this had stopped being a parent’s desperation and had become a sustained private campaign, run by professionals, against a man and his household.
The person who connected a Hamburg heiress to an Israeli intelligence cell was August Hanning. He ran the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, from 1998 to 2005, and afterward went into private security. Prosecutors say he put Block in touch with former Israeli intelligence officers and, with a retired police officer, took more than €100,000 from her in connection with the job. A letter from the veteran German private investigator Werner Mauss to the domestic intelligence service in January 2025 named Hanning as the man who had approached the former Shin Bet chief Yaakov Peri to assemble a team. Days later, by the same account, Peri offered to tell the court about Hanning’s role if his confidentiality were guaranteed. Hanning denies all of it, saying he never contacted Peri and knew of no payment.
His name surfaced because of an accident that the author reported on last week. On 6 October 2026 Hanning, the former chief of Germany’s intelligence service, was arrested on suspicion of treason and espionage, a case that grew out of the search of his home in the Block investigation. The man accused of brokering the abduction of two children was found to have a second life worth a separate indictment – and a movie. For the children, the simpler fact holds. The broker was a former chief of the German state’s intelligence service, and the state he once served had lost track of what he did next.
The firm named in the German courtroom is Cyber Cupula Operations, an Israeli outfit whose team, by the reporting around the trial, included former Mossad operatives and ran to at least eight people, most of them Israeli. The man described as the head of the abduction cell is David Ram Barkai, a veteran of the Israeli military’s Unit 504 and, by various accounts, a former Mossad agent. Over four days of testimony he told the court that Block and her lawyer had paid him and his men around €220,000 to take the children from their father and deliver them to her. Prosecutors have charged a second Israeli, Tal Sasson, and sought the arrest of Barkai and of Keren Tenenbaum, who left Germany. One member of the team, arrested earlier in Cyprus, told the court he had taken part not for money but to help the children, having been told their father was evil. He apologized to Hensel, who accepted it.
Above the cell, the name German media attached to the operation is Yaakov Peri, for six years the director of Israel’s internal security service and later a government minister, now president of a private intelligence firm called CGI. Bild reported that Peri assembled the Israeli team. In testimony, Block was asked whether she knew Peri’s name or knew of seven million euros said to have moved to CGI, and she said nothing. Peri could not be reached, his wife saying he was in a clinic. CGI’s chief executive told Der Spiegel the firm had nothing to do with the affair and did not know how its name had become attached to it. Block, for her part, has said the operatives acted on their own and that her late mother had engaged them.
CGI is a business-intelligence company of the kind Israel’s security establishment has produced in quantity, staffed from the alumni of its spy services and sold to governments and corporations around the world. The same firm was hired to review security after the 2019 theft of jewels worth more than a hundred million euros from the Green Vault in Dresden. These are not fringe operators. They are the commercial afterlife of state intelligence, and their client list is a question of who can pay. The defense in Hamburg has leaned on a related point, its lawyer telling the court that none of this could have happened if the police had done their job, which is a strange thing for an accused to argue and an accurate description of the vacuum these firms were hired to fill.
The method on display in Gråsten belongs to a wider pattern. Seizing a person by force across a border and delivering them to where someone else has decided they belong is the privatized retail form of something states have made routine. On 3 January 2026 the president of the United States announced that American forces had struck Venezuela and “captured” its president, Nicolás Maduro, flying him out of the country “in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement” to stand trial in Manhattan, a fifty-million-dollar bounty on his head. The abduction in Denmark happened two years before that, so the point is not imitation. The taboo against reaching across a border to take a person has dissolved at the top, and the men who built their careers performing such operations for states are now for hire to anyone with a grievance and the means. A sidelined heiress bought it for a custody fight.
The custody fight ended within days. A German court ordered the children returned to Denmark, and Block complied. She had held them for a long weekend. In the time since, a Danish family court has given Hensel sole custody, and a higher Danish court has barred Block from any contact with the children. Danish authorities say the two children want no further contact with their mother. They now live with their father at a secret address under changed names.
The operation worked, for about a day, and the working of it destroyed the thing it was meant to secure. A woman who believed, with a German court order behind her, that the law had abandoned her children reached outside the law and lost them completely. The children were the one party in this with no lawyers and no say, taped and bound in the back of a van while adults who had run the secret apparatus of two states collected their fees. The courts that could not move two children to safety across fifty kilometers of border proved able, once they had been taken by force, to move them only further out of reach.
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