On telephone conversations, tapped by the police, of secret service officer Temme with his colleagues

Today the court heard three former colleagues of Andreas Temme, officer of the Hessian domestic secret service and contact officer for several informers. Temme had had phone conversations with each of them in April/Mai 2006, when he had been a suspect in the case concerning the murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel.

On 9 May 2006, Temme had called his superior Muth, inter alia to talk about his official statement concerning the case. Muth first told him to simply write down events as they had happened, but quickly turned around and instead proposed that Temme first talk to a mutual colleague.

On 2 and 15 May 2006, Temme talked on the phone to his colleague Fehling. In the first conversation, Fehling reported on measures taken by the office to hinder and control the police investigation: they had made sure that the police did not have access to Temme’s sources or to the reports he had written in connection with the case. On a reconstruction effort at the scene of the crime which the police had at first planned to conduct with Temme, Fehling stated verbatim: “And I thought, if they take him there, he is dead. Thank god they did not take you there, right?” In the second conversation, Fehling was able to report: „And, erm, everything is quite, everything is, everything is going according to plan and we will have to see how things develop further.“

Finally, witness Hartmüller had already talked to Temme on 28 April 2006, Temme had stressed that „nobody from outside may find out anything about this.”

As was to be expected, all three witnesses tried to explain their statements as harmless and irrelevant. But they did not quite succeed, the phone calls – which had been tapped by the police and which the court listened to today – simply did not lend themselves to the harmless explanations provided by the witnesses today.

Interestingly, some of the witnesses stated that they had thought it possible that their phones were tapped – this would explain some of the unclear phrasings in these calls.
Fehling also stated that, beside the Nazi Benjamin Gärtner who is already known to the court, Temme had worked with another informer from the “right wing scene”. This would once more call into question whether it was truly only by chance that Temme was at the crime scene, or whether he had been tipped off after all

Once thing became crystal clear: if the court is to gain clarity about the events in Kassel, it can only do so based on the entire case file against Temme and all other documents concerning these events. The refusal to grant access to the court and the parties must necessarily lead to further delays in the trial – delays which could simply be prevented by granting such access.

The court has yet to decide on Zschäpe’s motion to relive her counsel Anja Sturm of her duties – the deadline for Zschäpe’s reply to Sturm’s (and Heer’s and Stahl’s) comments has been pushed to Thursday, 3 p.m. In court, Zschäpe continued to clearly show her disapproval of all three counsel.