Bug found in office of German leftist deputy (Roundup)

Europe News

Jan 23, 2007, 13:50 GMT

Berlin - A crude bug has been found in the Berlin office of a leftist legislator who sits on a top-secret panel monitoring the German intelligence services, senior government legislators said Tuesday. Intelligence chiefs are to be summoned to Berlin next week and asked if they know who planted a mysterious electrical device in the office of Wolfgang Neskovic, a Left Party member of the Bundestag parliament. Officials of the main German parties voiced outrage over the find. However the speaker of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, said the device did not work, 'so it would not have been possible to listen in.' Government sources said the device had not even been concealed. Neskovic is the sole Left Party member of a panel that receives regular briefings from the intelligence services and is sworn to secrecy. He is also on a special committee of inquiry studying why two men from Germany were put in US jails in Afghanistan. Norbert Roettgen and Olaf Scholz, the whips of the Christian Democratic parties and the Social Democratic Party, said they had asked the permanent intelligence committee to inquire. 'We have to find out if the intelligence agencies were involved or not,' said Roettgen. Germany's principal espionage agency is the BND, currently headquartered in Munich, which is responsible for foreign intelligence gathering. Parliamentary security experts were checking what the device was capable of doing. Reached while travelling on a train, Neskovic told a Berlin newspaper, the Tagesspiegel, that he had no personal knowledge of the discovery in his Berlin Bundestag rooms. Until several years ago, the Left Party had no representative on the secret committee because of concerns that the small socialist group was a security risk. Mainstream parties ultimately agreed that Neskovic was a person of probity who could join the committee. Neskovic is a member of a separate committee of inquiry into whether there was any German intelligence service complicity in the US detention at Guantanamo Bay of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national who grew up in Germany and who has now been released. The group is also looking into an abduction lasting several months, apparently by US agents, of German national Khaled al-Masri. © 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

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