(Bloomberg) -- Senior Alternative for Germany officials plan to quiz two lawmakers from the far-right party over their alleged links to a Europe-wide, pro-Russia disinformation network.

The AfD leadership will speak after the Easter break with Maximilian Krah, the party’s lead candidate for June’s EU Parliament elections, and Petr Bystron, a lawmaker in the lower house of parliament in Berlin, about the allegations in a report in Der Spiegel magazine, AfD spokesman Daniel Tapp told Bloomberg.

Both Krah and Bystron deny wrongdoing, Tapp said. The two lawmakers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Czech government said last week that its counterintelligence service had uncovered a Russian network trying to influence politics and public opinion across Europe, including making payments to European politicians.

The government in Prague didn’t give names of the alleged recipients or further details about the flow of the money, but it imposed sanctions on a local company that runs the Voice of Europe website and on two individuals linked to it.

It said one of the people was Viktor Medvedchuk, a politician close to Russian President Vladimir Putin who was arrested by Ukraine and charged with treason in 2021. He was handed over to Russia as part of a prisoner swap in 2022.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said the work of the nation’s counterintelligence agency led to “other countries in Europe investigating the activities of pro-Russian spy networks and gradually coming to more serious conclusions.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence service played a key role in the Czech investigation, according to a German official who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser was quoted as saying last week that the Czech probe had struck an “important blow” against Russian disinformation.

The fact that leading AfD politicians had repeatedly appeared on Voice of Europe was evidence that the party’s “Putin friends are repeatedly allowing themselves to be harnessed here and made part of the Russian propaganda apparatus,” Faeser told Spiegel.

It was “important that this influence operation was uncovered before the European elections,” Faeser added.

--With assistance from Peter Laca and Krystof Chamonikolas.

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