A Brewing Scandal?
January 23, 2007
News agencies reported on Tuesday that a member of the German parliament and Left party politician Wolfgang Neskovic found two microphones in his office and informed the authorities about them on Monday evening.
"We are talking about technical devices that do not belong to the office," said spokesperson for the Left party Hendrik Thalheim.
Officials for the parliament's administration meanwhile said that the microphones were not connected to any device that would have made it possible to listen in on, record or pass on conversations.
Neskovic is a member of the parliamentary panel investigating whether the country's foreign intelligence service BND breached German regulations while assisting US anti-terrorism operations after Sept.11 He is also a member of the parliamentary supervisory committee.
Both of these parliamentary bodies are currently involved with the case of Murat Kurnaz, a German resident with Turkish citizenship, who claims that members of Germany's KSK elite military unit abused him in a US prison camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in January 2002 before he was transferred to Guantanamo.
No details yet
Earlier on Tuesday, representatives of the two largest parties in the German parliament -- Norbert Röttgen of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Partz (SPD) -- said that they learned about the microphones from the secretary of the parliamentary committee.
"The microphones were not connected," Röttgen said.
Not much is known yet about who put the microphones in Neskovic's office and why.
"We don't know anything," Scholz said. "Our intelligence services should explain if they know something about his or not. Then we can set things clear."
SPD and CDU have called for a special session of the parliamentary supervisory committee next week to discuss the incident.
A brewing scandal
The discovery of the microphones in Neskovic's office may put yet another dramatic spin on the case that has been rocking German parliamentary circles for months.
German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung this week raised serious questions about the role played by the former German government led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the affair surrounding Kurnaz's detention and subsequent release from Guantanamo.
The newspaper reported that the German government was informed in 2002 that Kurnaz had been physically and psychologically abused in Guantanamo. It added that officials of Germany's BND Federal Intelligence Service who interrogated Kurnaz in Cuba in September 2002 had found no evidence linking him to any terrorist activity.
Faced with this information, Schröder's Social Democratic-Green Party government still tried to block Kurnaz' return to Germany after the 2005 federal elections, the paper said.