BAD KLEINEN: INVESTIGATION ON THE DEATH OF WOLFGANG GRAMS CLOSED
The public prosecutor has closed the investigation against two men of the anti-terrorist unit GSG-9, suspected of having executed the alleged 'RAF'-terrorist Wolfgang Grams. Grams died in a shoot-out with strong police forces in the East German town of Bad Kleinen, last June (see FECL No.17, p.1; No.21, p.10).
According to the conclusions of the investigation, Grams deliberately killed himself with his own weapon on June 27. The prosecutor's findings are based on an legal-medical and technical expertise of the police in Zurich (Switzerland), as well as "trustworthy witnesses". The declarations of two witnesses of the shoot-out according to which Grams was shot in cold blood by two police officers were full of gaps, contradictory and unconclusive, the prosecutor said.
The parents of Grams intend to appeal against the closure of the investigation. Their lawyer, Andreas Gross, has hitherto been refused access to the records. He does not accept the prosecutor's version that the stunning flow of contradictory statemenents and explanations produced by the authorities regarding the incident at Bad Kleinen are merely due to "a certain giddiness", "considerable breaches of memory", and "mistakes" of the anti-terrorist elite force involved in the shoot-out. The destruction and disappearance of crucial evidence is not a matter of mere blunders during the investigation, Gross contends, but rather the successful attempt to blur the investigation. The Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) publicly admitted no less than 17 "mistakes" in the Bad Kleinen investigation.
Although the findings of the prosecutor's investigation free the security forces of the accusation of having virtually executed Grams, the image of the GSG-9 is likely to have suffered a lasting blow. Indeed, none of the elite-officers, all of whom are well trained in arrest of suspects and securing of evidence, claims to have seen Grams commit suicide - nor does any of the civilian witnesses.
Source: Die WochenZeitung, 21.1.94.Comment
Half a year after the events at Bad Kleinen, the findings of the public prosecutor's office have put a formal end - for the time being - to a scandal that once threatened to turn into a serious "state crisis", as the German weekly Der Spiegel warned. Bad Kleinen led to the resignation of two leading figures of German "internal security" policies - Interior Minister, Rudolf Seiters, and the Federal Prosecutor General, Alexander von Stahl. Yet, it failed in producing the sort of public indignation and uproar that entailed the purge of a system of government based on plotting, secrecy, and corruption in Italy.
Once again, Germany has missed a chance to submit its omnipotent police apparatus to long due "democratic screening". Thus, continued rise of the German "Security state" seems irresistible.
N.B.