A German court this week sentenced a former political aide featured in ICIJ’s China Targets investigation to more than four years in prison after finding that he spied for China for nearly two decades.

Announcing the verdict in the Higher Regional Court in Dresden, judge Hans Schlueter-Staats detailed how Jian Guo, a German naturalized citizen, sought to identify and expose Chinese political dissidents and leaked hundreds of European Parliament documents to China while he was working as an assistant to German politician Maximilian Krah.

“For us, there is no question that you are an employee of a Chinese intelligence agency,” Schlueter-Staats said to Guo, citing wiretapped conversations and other evidence, according to German media.

Federal Prosecutor Stephan Morweiser told reporters that Guo’s “was the most serious case of Chinese espionage in Germany.”

Guo denied the accusations and insisted on his innocence. The Chinese government reportedly rejected the allegations of espionage.

ICIJ previously reported that Guo, who moved to Germany as a student more than 20 years ago, had infiltrated local dissident communities and gained the trust of senior leaders of organizations critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Guo helped during dissident groups’ conferences, taking care of the logistics, picking up international guests at the airport and buying food for the event participants.

The findings were part of China Targets, an ICIJ investigation in collaboration with 42 media partners, which detailed Chinese authorities’ tactics to monitor, intimidate and threaten political opponents and the failure of international institutions in countering state-sponsored repression. The use of civilians like Guo, the activist and businessman-turned-political aide, is yet another tool in the Chinese government’s repression playbook, ICIJ found.

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In interviews with ICIJ, activists who knew Guo described him as “low-key” and “quiet” with more senior activists and “aggressive” and “confident” with younger ones. In 2017, he was part of a delegation of Chinese democracy advocates who traveled from Europe to Dharamshala, India, to meet with representatives of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile and the Dalai Lama.

Guo is one of many Chinese nationals accused by Western authorities of working for China’s spy agencies and infiltrating anti-Communist Party groups around the world.

In Europe, where Guo was based, lawmakers interviewed by ICIJ said that authorities’ responses to such threats remain inadequate.

Tienchi Martin-Liao, a human rights advocate from Taiwan who, like Guo, was a member of the activist group Federation for a Democratic China, said that she was not surprised by the verdict.

“I think this is a warning to the Chinese authorities, that they should know that the Western countries are [becoming aware of] China’s espionage activities,” Martin-Liao told ICIJ.

“Guo[’s] case is only one example, there are lots of his comrades spread in the free Western society,” she said. “It is almost an open secret that some certain men or women are ‘double agents.’”

Guo was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison. A co-defendant was given a suspended sentence of one year and nine months. An appeal can be filed within one week from the Sep. 30 verdict.