Angela Merkel says she has 'hard evidence' that Russia hacked the German parliament and stole her emails

• Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, says she has 'hard evidence' that Russia was behind an 'outrageous' hacking attack which accessed her emails.
• She confirmed a report from a German magazine which said that Russian authorities were behind the 2015 cyber-attack which paralysed the IT systems of the Bundestag, Germany's parliament.
• 'Every day I try to build a better relationship with Russia and on the other hand there is such hard evidence that Russian forces are doing this,' Merkel said.
• German authorities have identified the alleged main culprit in the 2015 cyber-attack on the Bundestag as Dimitri Badin, a Russian operative, Der Spiegel reported.

• Badin has also been accused of beinggett behind hacking attacks on the US Democratic Party, the world doping agency, a Swiss chemical weapons laboratory, and others.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she has "hard evidence" that Russia was behind an "outrageous" hacking attack which accessed her emails and paralysed the IT systems of the Bundestag, Germany's parliament.

She was asked on Wednesday about a report in Der Spiegel, a German magazine, which said that the GRU, Russia's military intelligence wing, was behind a hacking attack on the Bundestag in 2015 which accessed emails from her constituency office.

"I can honestly say that it pains me," she said in parliament, according to AFP news agency. "Every day I try to build a better relationship with Russia and on the other hand there is such hard evidence that Russian forces are doing this."

According to Der Spiegel, German authorities have identified the alleged main culprit in the 2015 cyber-attack on the Bundestag as Dimitri Badin, a GRU operative.

He is accused of stealing 16 gigabytes of data, including all emails from Merkel's parliamentary office between 2012 and 2015.

Badin is also reportedly part of the team behind hacking attacks on the Democratic Party in the 2016 US presidential election, the world doping agency, a chemical weapons laboratory in Switzerland, and others.

Both the FBI and Germany's Federal Court of Justice are seeking his arrest.

The German government has consistently stressed the importance of trying to improve relations with Russia even as it continues to be linked to hacking attacks and extrajudicial killings across Europe.

Ties between Russia and Germany have become particularly strained since the murder of a former Chechen commander in a Berlin park. German prosecutors have said there is evidence that the killing was carried out by Russian or Chechen state agents.

Merkel described such acts as "more than uncomfortable" and indicated that she would consider imposing new sanctions on Russia, AFP reported.

Merkel said: "It, of course, disrupts cooperation of trust and you know that in connection with the murder ... we applied sanctions, in this case, expulsions [of Russian diplomats]."

"We now have the task of finding the wanted suspect, but of course we always reserve the right to take measures -- also against Russia, to be clear."

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