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Eight German police commandos are under investigation for allegedly having trained Libyan police for profit in their spare time."The behaviour of the police officers is completely unacceptable," said Ingo Wolf, interior minister in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.German media say the elite commandos allegedly worked for a private firm and flew to Libya in 2006 to train police.Libya's leader Col Muammar Gaddafi rejected terrorism in 2003.Col Gaddafi also agreed to dismantle the country's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes.Since then Libya's relations with Western powers have improved dramatically.The commando training programmes were illegal and the German officers did not inform their superiors about their activities in Libya.According to a German government spokesman, the officers have been removed from Germany's elite SEK commando force, the BBC's Tristana Moore reports.Private security firm
Prosecutors in Duesseldorf are investigating one of the men, a 48 year-old former SEK officer, over allegations that he trained Libyan police from 2005 to 2007. He is facing charges of violating secrecy guidelines.According to German media reports, SEK members were hired by a private security firm two years ago, believed to have been set up by a former member of Germany's GSG-9 anti-terrorism unit.It is alleged that up to 30 German officers, from Cologne, Essen and Bielefeld, flew to Libya while on leave, in order to train Libyan security forces in anti-terror techniques.They were reportedly paid up to 15,000 euros (£12,000; $24,000) each in return for the training programmes - some allegedly were rewarded with paid holidays in Tunisia.On Friday, a spokesman for the federal interior ministry in Berlin could only confirm that no current member of the GSG-9 unit was involved in the investigation.Details of the training have not been revealed, but the authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia confirmed that they had known about the allegations since the summer of 2007, after receiving a tip-off from the regional criminal police office (LKA).The German defence ministry has also confirmed that a military police officer in Berlin has been suspended from duty over allegations that he helped organise the training of Libyan security forces in his spare time.German opposition politicians have called for an immediate parliamentary inquiry and the affair has provoked outrage among police unions, our correspondent reports."These are colleagues with the highest training standard worldwide, who are very professional and are being deployed on extremely dangerous missions: in terrorism, in organised crime," said Frank Richter from the German police union, the GdP."If these mission tactics are getting into the wrong hands, that's a real danger to colleagues in North Rhine-Westphalia, in the whole of Germany, and to officers on foreign missions," he said.
As in the days of Noah....
