Then I was wondering what this German guy was doing there by the name of Gerhard Merz. Merz was arrested together with South African mercenaries and an Armenian crew. He was a transportation officer sent to Equatorial Guinea by a company in Frankfurt, a freight company that was hiring Armenian planes and crews. He died there roughly nine days after he was arrested on 17 March 2004. Interestingly in Germany it didn’t make headlines, but at least one paper in Frankfurt reported about it and the Foreign Office in Berlin seemed to me to put the whole affair under the carpet. Inquiries that I started led to absolutely nothing. The Foreign Office at that time professed to know nothing about it until after I sent a complaint the attorney general in Berlin. It was at that time a docket was opened and the investigation started.
What happened is Merz died, was flown to Germany back after four months and a post-mortem was carried out at the University of Frankfurt. That’s the institution where I studied so I know the place quite well.
Up to now, there is no final report which proves or disproves the fact that Gerhard Merz was tortured. The Government of Equatorial Guinea claims that Gerhard Merz died of malaria, but the post mortem showed that this was not the case. He died of myocardial infarction. He certainly had a heart problem. He was a patient who suffered from hypertension. He had an enlarged heart.
Somebody who was with him in the same cell, and later on acquitted, gave a press conference in South Africa last year, claiming that they were severely tortured and beaten up.
The interesting story is what is the background of a a man like Gerhard Merz, who was more than fifty years old. I researched and found out that this man had, together with an Israeli citizen by the name of Regenstreich, transported nerve gas components for the production of the nerve gas mustardintherine from China into Iran from 1992 to 1995.
Interestingly at the same time, the British MI6 transported nerve gas and nerve gas components together with an Israeli by the name of Nahum Manbar also via the same Iranian contacts in Vienna from China into Iran. Yet at this same time America was searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The question is why did they do that.
At the same time the American Government under Bill Clinton issued banning orders against Nahum Manbar, Regenstreich, Gerhard Merz, and their company Mainway and castigated this. There is no doubt that these weapons of mass destruction were transported from China to Iran with the support of the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. However, Manbar did it one year longer than the Israeli Government wanted it. The reason for that was that at that time Israel was for the first time subjected to attacks from southern Lebanon with weapons they had actually delivered to Iran. We all know that the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is supported by Iran.
So then and only then the Israelis thought they might also start to use these weapons of mass destruction one day. You cannot believe that the Israeli Government and secret service are so silly that only in 1994 they got the idea that these weapons of mass destruction might actually be dangerous for themselves. My personal opinion is that they wanted to find a case for the Americans to attack Iran. And there are lots of indications that the Americans are planning that at the present moment. And in this case they could prove, unlike in Iraq, that there were weapons of mass destruction.
The question is how far was the German Secret Service involved. We don’t know that. However, I have asked one member of the German Parliament by the name of Hartwig Fischer, and he has taken up that case and inquired from the German Foreign Office to what extent this German guy was actually acting on his own, or whether he was there with approval of other institutions, and why the German Foreign Office did not protest after the obvious proof of mishandling of the prisoners.
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