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Swiss charge three in nuclear weapons case

Swiss prosecutors said on Tuesday they had charged a father and his two sons for helping an unknown state build up an illegal nuclear weapons programme, after they admitted the crime.

Published: 13 December 2011 11:14 CET
Updated: 13 December 2011 13:35 CET

Swiss charge three in nuclear weapons case

Bailly Elodie (File)

Prosecutors launched a case against Marco and Urs Tinner in October 2004 and their father Friedrich the following year on suspicion of links with the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of the Pakistani atom bomb”, who supplied Libya with nuclear weapons technology.

“Based on the admissions made by the Tinner brothers and their father and at their request, the Office of the Attorney-General (OAG) in November 2011 ruled that accelerated proceedings should be conducted,” said the prosecutors office.

“In the indictment, the accused and the OAG request that the court return verdicts of guilty in relation to offences under the War Material Act and against one of the sons for forgery of documents.”

Prosecutors said they would ask the Federal Criminal Court to accept a plea bargain covering sentences and costs in a shortened process.

“As a result of the admissions made by the suspects, no evidence will be heard in the main proceedings,” the statement said.

The brothers spent three-and-a-half years in pre-trial custody before being released in December 2008 and January 2009. Their father had been earlier released in 2006, according to prosecutors.

Marco and Urs lodged a claim with the European Court of Human Rights over the lengthy period behind bars but the Strasbourg court ruled in April that their rights had not been violated.

The men were suspected of helping Tripoli develop centrifuges to enrich uranium from 2001 to 2003 and collaborating with Khan, but in Tuesday’s statement, Swiss prosecutors did not name Libya in its charges but referred only to an “unknown state.”

Newspaper reports claimed the family were later recruited by the CIA to help halt Libya from gaining nuclear capability.

In 2007 the Swiss government ordered that material seized in the course of the investigation be destroyed to stop nuclear weapons plans falling into hostile hands.

The prosecutor’s office did not release specific details of the charges filed.

Libya agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons plans in 2003 under pressure from the West.

Why Germany's nuclear exit is posing tough questions about its energy future

Gundremmingen nuclear power plant. Photo: DPA

But change is coming to the village, with the plant facing imminent closure under Germany’s energy transition policy.

Former village mayor Wolfgang Mayer’s house has direct views of the imposing complex with its two 160-metre cooling towers — taller than the spires of Cologne Cathedral.

The plant still produces 10 billion kWh of power per year, though parts of it have already been shut down — enough to provide the entire Munich metropolitan region with electricity.

The power station will be decommissioned on December 31, 2021, along with two other facilities in northern Germany.

By the end of 2022, Germany will have achieved its goal of completely phasing out nuclear power, set by Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 30, 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

SEE ALSO: Berlin agrees to compensate power firms for nuclear phase out

The plan represented a dramatic change of course by Merkel’s ruling conservatives, who just a few months earlier had agreed to extend the lifespan of Germany’s oldest power stations.

But it was met with widespread public support in a country with a powerful anti-nuclear movement, fuelled first by fears of a Cold War conflict and then by disasters such as Chernobyl.

Village church

In Gundremmingen, however, the decision has been a tough pill to swallow.

The nuclear power station has been “as much a part of the village as the church” and it feels as though “something is dying”, said Gerlinde Hutter, owner of a local guest house.

According to Meyer, it will take at least 50 years to remove all radioactive material from the site after the plant has been decommissioned.
The German government is still looking for a long-term storage site for the country’s residual nuclear waste.

Gundremmingen is not the only German village facing big changes as the country strives to implement its energy transition strategy.

Renewables have seen a spectacular rise since 2011 and in 2020 made up more than 50 percent of Germany’s energy mix for the first time, according to the Fraunhofer research institute — compared with less than 25 percent ten years ago.

The declining importance of nuclear power (12.5 percent in 2020) “has been compensated for by the expansion of renewable energies”, Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert at the DIW economic research institute, told AFP.

Nuclear power stations have therefore not been replaced by coal, though the fossil fuel does still represent almost a quarter of the electricity mix.

The gas dilemma

In fact, the phase-out of nuclear energy has been joined by another plan, announced in 2019, to close all of Germany’s coal-fired power stations by 2038.

This presents a particular challenge for Germany, which remains the world’s leading producer of lignite.

Mining for the brown coal, which is highly polluting, continues to lead to the destruction of villages in the west of the country in order to expand huge open-cast mines.

If Germany is to free itself from lignite, renewables such as wind, solar, biomass and hydropower will have to make up 65 percent of the energy mix by 2030.

Yet the country, which has long been at the forefront of wind energy in Europe, installed only 1.65 gigawatts (GW) of wind farms last year — the lowest level in a decade, according to the WindEurope advocacy group.

To meet the government’s targets, Germany would have to add 9.8 GW of solar and 5.9 GW of onshore wind annually, according to Kemfert.

But the development of new areas for wind or photovoltaic energy production is complex, with plans often coming up against resistance from local residents and the risk of damage to the landscape.

And unless storage and distribution can be improved via so-called virtual power plants, these new forms of energy do not have the same stability as thermal or nuclear power.

To secure its supply, Germany could therefore be tempted to build more gas-fired power stations.

But this would risk reinforcing its dependence on Russia, as illustrated by the controversy surrounding the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

A gas-fired power station is already in the works for the town of Leipheim, just around the corner from Gundremmingen.

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