Five German Executives Arrested on Charges of Exporting to Iraq

Five German business executives were arrested this week, charged with illegally exporting to Iraq machinery and other equipment that could improve its Soviet-made Scud missiles and advance its nuclear weapons program.

The executives are from the New Magdeburger Machine Tool Factory in Bielefeld, in northwest Germany, and the H and H company in Mannheim, in the south-central part of the country.

If convicted, they would face up to five years in prison.

Several other businessmen were arrested in Bavaria last week on similar charges.

The latest arrests coincided with disclosures that Iraqi soldiers were trained in what was formerly East Germany for nuclear and chemical warfare.

But most attention now is focused on the five business executives, since the prosecution claims their illicit exports continued until “very recently.”

Both companies allegedly helped Iraq in its ambitious program to build superguns and other arms in addition to improving the Scuds.

H and H has been cited several times as one of the German companies that supplied Iraq with equipment to build centrifuges for the production of weapons-grade enriched uranium.

The plant is located near Munster, hometown of Economics Minister Jurgen Mollemann, who has been accused in the German parliament of helping the company do business with Iraq despite the government’s ban.

The reports about Iraqi soldiers trained on German soil appeared in several newspapers this week. They reportedly came from documents of the defunct Communist People’s Army.

The reports said East Germany also sent Iraq equipment to train soldiers for situations where they might be exposed to limited amounts of poison gas or nuclear radiation.

The training facility for that purpose was located at Storkow in what is now the federal state of Brandenburg. It so impressed the Iraqis that they insisted on having a duplicate assembled for them near Baghdad, the reports said.