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German authorities are ready to deport several US diplomats if the information that they tapped phone calls is confirmed, German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich has claimed.
“It’s quite clear that if US embassy or other agency employees are involved in the case, they will be punished. Speaking of diplomats, they will be deported,” Friedrich said in an interview with the ARD network.
He also added that, for now, the most important thing was to look closely into the spying incident and sort it out. Besides, he underlined that Washington still didn’t have answers to many questions Germany had asked the US in relation to the scandal.
The German Interior Minister expressed hope the scandal wouldn’t undermine US-German relations. According to European media reports, the NSA eavesdropped on the phone calls of 28 EU countries representatives, including Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. American secret services also spied on these countries’ embassies in Washington, the Guardian newspaper says.
Earlier this month, German Der Spiegel magazine reported that US intelligence had allegedly tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone.
The alleged US spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone may have been run out of its Berlin embassy, less than a kilometre (mile) from the chancellery, media reported Friday.
The surveillance was allegedly conducted by a listening post of the Special Collection Service, run jointly by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency, said the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
The eavesdropping programme "works worldwide in American embassies and consulates, mostly in secret," it said, citing documents provided by fugitive former NSA intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
The alleged spying on Merkel, made public Wednesday by the German government, sent shock waves though the country and was roundly condemned by legislators and in the media.
"Spying between friends, that's just not done," Merkel said Thursday from Brussels, where the agenda of a European Union summit was hijacked by the growing spy scandal.
Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle on the same day called in the US ambassador and then demanded Washington provide straight answers on the allegations.
German news weekly Der Spiegel this year reported that Special Collection Service surveillance devices could be hidden in US embassies around the world, again citing Snowden documents.
In August, a German police helicopter conducted a fly-over of the US consulate in Frankfurt to search for suspected listening posts, it said.
Voice of Russia, Interfax, AFP
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