Substandard Spies?

Police investigators said they suffered from incomplete information provided by intelligence agencies and swaths of Germany were left unprotected from other serious crimes while authorities pursued three terror suspects, according to an article in the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ).

Intelligence officers needed six weeks to analyze recorded conversations and police investigators had to rely on their personal mobile phones to discuss the case because secure telephone connections were often not available outside of business hours, the paper reported.

The report was also critical of internal personnel decisions that sent officers assigned to the case back to other departments, which led to a lack of continuity in the investigation, the paper quoted from the police report.

No extra officers available

For four months the three German states of Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and Saarland did not have any mobile deployment teams on hand to send to an emergency situation, the SZ reported.

"During the investigation, it became clear that there are serious shortcomings in terms of the police's personnel and equipment," Konrad Freiberg, head of the police union, told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung for its Thursday, Dec. 13, edition.

Despite the difficulties, police arrested three alleged terrorists on Sept. 4 before attacks amounting to what chief federal prosecutor Monika Harms called the "biggest planned attacks in Germany" could be carried out.

Experts said the amount of explosive material the three had assembled would have been able to cause explosions far greater than those in London in July 2005 and in Madrid in March 2004.

A distressing situation

The German interior ministry, which is responsible for both the police and intelligence departments, did not comment on the report on Wednesday. The country's 16 state interior ministers, however, are scheduled to discuss the police report, which was written in November.

Wolfgang Bosbach, deputy head of the Christian Democratic Union's parliamentary group, called on the interior ministers to address the problems mentioned in the report.

"It is distressing to see the serious problems that had to be fought against," he told Thursday's Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger daily.

Security's one-way street

The police report's conclusion called for police to be outfitted with their own means of procuring intelligence information, according to an article in the online version of Der Spiegel newsmagazine.

Such a conclusion can only serve as propaganda for state and federal police forces looking to gain additional investigative powers, two anonymous intelligence officers told the magazine.

"It all goes relentlessly in one direction: the police want their own intelligence service," one of the officers told Spiegel Online, adding that the police had acquired all the information they needed.