September 10, 2002	Tuesday	Rajab 2, 1423

HEIDELBERG: The issue of how to balance national security and civil liberties shot onto the Germany’s election agenda on Sunday after the arrest last week near the US army headquarters in Europe of a couple suspected of planning a bomb attack on September 11.

Germany’s centre-left coalition has so far been less willing than many other European governments to compromise individual freedoms in pursuit of the “war on terror”. But as he prepared for a second, possibly decisive TV debate with his challenger, Edmund Stoiber, Germany’s chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, was under growing pressure to crack down.

The conservative challenger for the chancellorship, Edmund Stoiber, said suspicion of belonging to an illegal organisation should be enough to justify the expulsion of foreigners from the country. “We absolutely cannot wait until something has happened,” he told a rally at the weekend.

His proposal could have far-reaching effects on race relations. Many immigrants are classed as foreigners in Germany despite having been born or brought up in the country.

An ethnic Turk, Osman Petmezci, aged 25, and his US-German partner, Astrid Eyzaguirre, aged 23, were still in custody on Sunday after being detained last week near Heidelberg in possession of timing devices and a large quantity of chemicals which the authorities said could have been made into explosives. A picture of Osama bin Laden was found in their flat.

The Social Democrat interior minister, Otto Schily, said a change in the law was unnecessary: “So far as I can judge from the present state of our knowledge [Petmezci] is a very dangerous man. He could have been expelled even under the old law and most certainly under the new anti-terrorist legislation [passed since September 11].”

The Christian Democrats’ leader in parliament, Franz Bosbach, meanwhile called for fingerprints to be put on passports and identity cards. Legislation has been enacted that would allow this to be done, but it has not been implemented because of reservations within the governing coalition on civil liberties grounds.

“No one has a civil right to an easily forgeable passport or ID card,” said Mr Bosbach.

The authorities have said they suspect Petmezci and Eyzaguirre of planning an attack in the centre of Heidelberg or on a US military facility. German official sources said Eyzaguirre, who works in a US forces’ PX supermarket, tipped off a friend to stay away from it on September 11.

The interior ministry said on Saturday there was no evidence so far to link either detainee to a terrorist organisation. But Mr Schily stressed yesterday that “loners” formed an integral part of the “overall terrorist threat”.

Police were yesterday reported to be studying two diskettes taken away from the couple’s flat to see if there was any evidence they benefited from a support structure.

Mr Stoiber’s spokesman on law and order, Gunther Beckstein, said he found it hard to see how, without training, Petmezci, could have ”learned to work with chemicals and electronic [timing] devices”.

Two further key questions began to emerge at the weekend. One was how Petmezci eluded the German authorities’ vast, computerised ”profile search” of the entire residential population.

He made no secret of his hatred of Jews, and Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported on Sunday that he had no less than six convictions for theft, embezzlement and drugs-dealing. Mr Beckstein said the parameters of the search needed to be changed.

The other question was how closely the US authorities had vetted Eyzaguirre before issuing her a pass that reportedly gave her access to high-security areas. Some 19,000 US military and civilian personnel and family members live in the Heidelberg area.

A 1995 study by the Bonn International Centre for Conversion highlighted the paradox that the American forces in Germany are more integrated with the local community than in the US itself. It said: “The Stateside army bases tend to be large, single-site, self-sufficient facilities located in rural or suburban areas. By comparison, the US Military Communities in Germany are collections of independent sites often very near the city centre ... The soldiers and their families may live in nearby US-operated “family housing complexes” or find their own housing within the neighbouring German communities.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.