3 Germans Sentenced in Libya Poison Gas Case

In a case that damaged the global image of German business and deeply embarrassed the government, a regional court sentenced three chemical-company executives to jail terms Wednesday for their roles in illegally exporting to Libya components of a factory capable of producing poison gas.

The senior chemist and two leading engineers of the Imhausen-Chemie GmbH chemical company received sentences of 10 to 16 months and fines totaling more than $150,000 from the court in the western city of Mannheim.

The judgments were the latest in a string of prosecutions linked to the so-called Imhausen Affair, which stunned Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government when it became public in early 1989.

Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had both initially rejected accusations, stemming mainly from leaked U.S. intelligence reports, that the German company secretly supplied Libya with a plant designed to produce sarin and soman, highly toxic chemical warfare agents.

However, as evidence mounted, they were forced to admit that a respectable member of Germany’s large chemical industry intentionally eluded controls and exported the plant to Libya by shipping components first to Hong Kong.

Imhausen’s chief chemist, Eugen Lang, 47, was sentenced to 16 months in jail and fined more than $100,000 for his participation in the Libyan plant, at Rabta. He still faces fraud charges for allegedly misrepresenting the project to win government research funding.

An engineer who helped design the plant, 68-year-old Friedrich Schoeffel, was jailed for 14 months and fined $45,000. Another designer, Ruediger Berndt, 50, was fined $5,000 and given a 10-month suspended jail term.

Last year, the former head of the company, Juergen Hippenstiel-Imhausen, was sentenced to five years for his part in the affair.

Senior public prosecutor Peter Wechsung said 12 additional cases are pending.

Bonn’s relations with Libya were strained after a mysterious fire destroyed the plant in March, 1990. Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi accused the United States and Germany of sabotaging the facility.

The disclosure was the first in a series of instances in which seemingly upstanding German companies managed to take advantage of lax export controls and a cozy relationship between industry and government to ship key ingredients for chemical and other types of war materials to the Mideast.

Investigations during the Gulf War indicated that German companies provided key ingredients for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s chemical-weapons arsenal in addition to components needed to upgrade ballistic missiles and achieve nuclear self-sufficiency.

The verdicts came amid renewed worry here that U.N. teams searching for the origins of Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program will find more German fingerprints.