HAMBURG: The Communist regime in former East Germany used a hit squad of hired killers to bump off at least 25 people in the 1970s and ‘80s, including the regime’s own finance minister, according to chilling revelations.

The revelations, which dominated headlines across Germany over the weekend, followed the announcement last week of the arrest of a 52-year-old man suspected of having been East Germany’s “official hit man”.

While federal officials have clamped a news embargo on details of the case, newspapers and magazines have unearthed startling insights into the ruthless cold-bloodedness of former top East German leaders.

It is now believed that Erich Honecker himself may have ordered the “elimination” of a whole range of persons who displeased, embarrassed or otherwise crossed him in one way or another.

One such figure was East German Finance Minister Siegfried Boehm, whose sudden violent death in May 1980 raised eyebrows among the international intelligence community, but scarcely made headlines at the time. The official version of his death, put out by the East German regime, was that Boehm’s wife shot him to death because he had threatened to leave her. She then turned the gun on herself.

Now investigators are convinced that a hit squad, working on orders from the highest level, killed Boehm because he had threatened to announce that the Communist country was on the verge of bankruptcy. The hit squad killed his wife in order to make the murder-suicide story look more convincing.

Even investigators of the Stasi secret police were unaware of the true nature of Boehm’s death, according to a report in Berliner Zeitung on Saturday.

The allegations, if borne out, paint a chilling picture of a squad of five or six hired killers operating independently of the Stasi and East German intelligence agencies.

Adding credence to the allegations are revelations that a West German businessman was killed in 1987 because he refused to engage in gun-running operations for the East German regime. Uwe Harms, who operated an import-export firm in Hamburg, was found dead, his body stuffed in a plastic garbage bag and dumped in an alley in the Reeperbahn red-light district of the harbour city.

Hamburg police at the time were led to believe Harms had been killed by a gay prostitute. His killer was never found.

But West German intelligence knew at the time that Harms’s import-export company was in fact financed by the East German Communist Party.

It has taken more than 15 years, but investigators now believe Harms baulked at orders from East Berlin to smuggle large quantities of arms through the port of Hamburg. He paid for that refusal with his life, they say.—dpa