  |
|
Council of Europe should probe Russian spy's death: German official
AFP
BERLIN
Petroleumworld.com 11 26 06The German government's human rights commissioner, Gunter Nooke, on Saturday called for the Council of Europe to look into the radioactive poisoning death of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, amid allegations that the Kremlin was responsible.
"Russia itself, as a member of the Council of Europe, should be interested in seeing this matter cleared up quickly so as not to create false speculations," Nooke told the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung.
The mysterious death Thursday in London of the former spy, following on last month's killing of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, both critical of the current regime of President Vladimir Putin, "does not cast a good light on the situation of free speech and press freedom," said Nooke, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat Union.
According to Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, head of the Council of Europe's mission on human rights in Russia, the 46-nation council, set up to defend human rights and democracy, will now have to take up the two cases.
Putin must fully clear up the situation, Hans-Gert Poettering, head of head of the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) and likely future president of the European Parliament, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, head of the Greens group in the EU parliament, bluntly called Putin's regime "terrorist and anti-democratic".
A Russian human rights activist, Anna Schor-Chudnovskaya, accused the European Union of not doing enough to defend democratic principles in its relations with Moscow because it wants access to Russian gas resources, she wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau paper.
Litvinenko, 43, who had left Russia six years ago and became a British citizen, accused Putin of being responsible for his death in a letter released posthumously.
Russia has denied any involvement and Putin on Friday criticized using Litvinenko's death for political purposes.
AFP 251510 GMT 11 06
Copyright© 2001 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
Your
feedback is important to us!
We invite all our readers to share with us
their views and comments about this article.
Write to editor@petroleumworld.com
Any
question or suggestions, please write to:
editor@petroleumworld.com
Best
Viewed with IE
5.01+
Windows
NT 4.0, '95, '98 and ME +/ 800x600 pixels