Former German chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed accusations of a cover-up regarding her handling of intelligence reports on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, her spokeswoman said on Thursday.

The comment came after three newspapers reported that Germany's BND spy agency had concluded in 2020 that there was a strong likelihood the coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, but the finding was never released to the public.

"Former chancellor Merkel categorically rejects the accusation implied in your question," a spokeswoman told Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper when asked whether Merkel, who left office in 2021, had concealed relevant information from the public.

Merkel's successor, Olaf Scholz, has refused to discuss the reports.

"As far as intelligence findings are concerned, this is not the place to discuss them," he said at a press conference on Wednesday.

The reports published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit said that the BND and Germany's Chancellery had asked scientists to examine the evidence in regards to the lab leak theory.

Investigators concluded that there was an 80% to 95% likelihood that a lab leak was to blame, based on information in the public domain, the papers said.

This hotly contested theory posits that the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes the Covid-19 disease, originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted research on coronaviruses, and began spreading through some sort of accident or failure at the lab.

The findings by the German intelligence community have not been made public. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that while the BND believed it had plausible evidence to support the theory, not all the researchers on the panel were convinced.

The other major theory for the pandemic's origin is that the virus had a purely natural origin, just like the SARS outbreak in 2002-03.

Beijung's response

Earlier in Beijing, China had urged caution and political restraint in the wake of reports that Germany's BND intelligence agency gathered plausible evidence that the coronavirus pandemic originated with a laboratory leak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

"On the issue of the coronavirus, China firmly rejects any form of political posturing," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in Beijing.

She said any discussion of the scientific issues surrounding Covid-19 should be left to scientists.

Mao also noted that an international team led by the World Health Organization had visited the Wuhan lab as part of their investigation into the origins of the pandemic. The team largely dismissed the so-called "lab leak" theory in 2021.

Still, the WHO has emphasized that all hypotheses regarding the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus remain on the table. As recently as December the UN agency called on Beijing to provide more pandemic-related data.

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