Berlin Regional Court dismisses complaint in Cicero affair

The complaint by journalist Bruno Schirra against the confiscation of his files on the so-called party donation affair was rejected by the Berlin Regional Court. The court rejected the appeal on the grounds that Schirra could have made himself liable to prosecution through his articles in the party donation affair. The affair concerned donations to the CDU, which former Chancellor Helmut Kohl is said to have administered without declaring them as donations, and investigators from the Brandenburg State Office of Criminal Investigation and the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation searched Schirra's apartment at the end of August 2005. The Potsdam public prosecutor's office accuses the journalist of quoting from confidential files of the Federal Criminal Police Office in his article about the terrorist Mussab Al Zarkawi published in the magazine Cicero. Schirra is thus alleged to have aided and abetted the betrayal of secrets. During the search of Schirra's apartment, files on the party donation scandal were also seized by chance, so that the public prosecutor's office in Berlin opened a second case against the journalist.