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March 1, 2001 Germany Arrests Two Iraqis Suspected of Spying
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By REUTERS
Filed at 12:15 p.m. ET
BERLIN (Reuters) - German state prosecutors said on Thursday federal police had arrested two Iraqis on suspicion of spying.
The two men were detained in Heidelberg, according to a German television report. German officials declined to comment on the report.
The U.S. Army in Europe (USEUR) has its headquarters in the southwestern town. The army's Fifth Corps, made up of armored and infantry divisions, is also stationed in the town famous for its university.
Iraq last month threatened to consider unspecified retaliatory action after air strikes on Baghdad by U.S. and British planes which it said killed two civilians and wounded more than 20 others.
Officials at USEUR and at the United States embassy in Berlin declined to comment on the case.
``We have spoken with the state prosecutors -- it is their investigation and we have no comment,'' said Jim Boyle, USEUR spokesman in Heidelberg.
State prosecutors said in a statement that one of the men was detained on February 25 and the other on February 27. Both had been brought before a federal judge, who ordered them to be held on suspicion of spying.
``They are suspected of carrying out missions for an Iraqi intelligence service in a number of German towns since the beginning of 2001,'' said a spokeswoman for state prosecutor Kay Nehm in Karlsruhe.
The spokeswoman said she could not provide further details because the investigation was continuing.
Officials at the German federal crime office (BKA) in Wiesbaden, the BND intelligence agency and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution all declined to make any comment on the case.
GERMAN ``UNDERSTANDING'' FOR U.S. RAIDS
In a visit to Washington last week, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said he understood the motives for the controversial attack on Iraqi radar installations last month. The raids, and Fischer's comments, were criticized by some members of his pacifist Greens party.
There have been other cases of spies working for Iraq caught in Germany.
A disgraced German diplomat was convicted in 1991 of spying for Iraq.
Juergen Mohammed Gietler, a 45-year-old former archivist for the Foreign Ministry convicted for giving Iraqi agents secret information that helped Baghdad during the Gulf War, later admitted that for many years in the 1980s he had passed secret German documents about Israel and the Middle East to Egypt.
Among the most potentially damaging documents he passed along were secret letters between then-U.S. President George Bush and then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl about U.S. military plans to move troops and weapons through Germany to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.
Gietler was released in 1994 after serving three years of a five-year term in jail.
In 1999, a German chemical engineer, Karl-Heinz Schaab, was sentenced to five years in jail for selling nuclear technology to Iraq. Schaab admitted he sold top secret uranium enrichment technology to Iraq without government approval during five visits to the country in 1989 and 1990.
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