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German woman found stabbed to death on Italian motorway

Italian police are investigating the murder of a German woman whose body was found next to a motorway in the Calabria region on Saturday.

Published: 6 December 2009 11:20 CET

German woman found stabbed to death on Italian motorway

Photo: DPA

The 40-year-old woman had been stabbed to death, Italian newspapers reported on Sunday, but they also said that the woman had been dead for two days before her body was found.

She was not killed on the motorway, but her body had been dumped next to the road not far from the town of Cosenza.

Detectives have told Turin-based newspaper La Stampa that the woman, named only as Petra S., had a surprising amount of personal documentation with her.

The handbag found with her body contained not only a purse with money in it, but also bank documents, savings books, credit cards and a number of letters written to people in Germany.

The Italian police have released a photograph of the woman in an appeal for information.

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German army faces new questions over online security

Federal prosecutors are already investigating a secret army conversation on the Ukraine war that was wiretapped and ended up on Russian social media in March.

The latest security flaw that Zeit Online reported on again concerned the online video-conference tool Webex, a popular public platform for audio and video meetings, with additional security buffers built in.

Zeit Online said it had been able to access Germany army meetings by using simple search terms on the platform.

“More than 6,000 meetings could be found online,” some of which were meant to be classified, it wrote.

Sensitive issue covered included the long-range Taurus missiles that Ukraine has been calling for, and the issue of online warfare.

Online meeting rooms attributed to 248,000 German soldiers were easy to detect thanks to weak online design that lacked even password protection, Zeit Online added. That allowed its reporters to find the online meeting room of air force chief Ingo Gerhartz.

Multiple security flaws

His name came up during reports of the earlier leak in March, when a recording of the talks between four high-ranking air force officers was posted on Telegram by the head of Russia’s state-backed RT channel. He was one of the four officers recorded.

Zeit Online said that the army only became aware of the security flaws after they approached them for comment. The security issue was first identified by Netzbegruenung, a group of cyber-activists, it reported.

An army spokesman confirmed to AFP that there was a flaw in the army’s Webex sites but that once it had been drawn to their attention they had corrected it within 24 hours.

“It was not possible to participate in the videoconferences without the knowledge of the participants or without authorisation,” he added. “No confidential content could therefore leave the conferences.”

Zeit Online said the Webex sites of Chancellor Olaf Scholz as well as key government ministers had the same flaws and that they had been able to connect to Scholz’s site on Saturday.

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