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US Furious At Germany Over Leaked Kadhafi Memo: Press
MUNICH, Germany, May 19 (Islamonline & News Agencies) - The US embassy in Berlin has demanded an urgent explanation from Germany over the reported leak of a top-secret memo about a meeting between that included details of an alleged admission by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi of a 1986 bomb attack in Berlin, news agencies said.
The memo also contained information on a meeting between Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and US President George W. Bush, the German weekly Focus said.
In its edition dated Monday the paper said US diplomats had warned that the leak of the document -- which among other things reported a purported statement by Kadhafi -- could seriously damage US-German relations.
The document, said to contain the minutes of a meeting between the two leaders in March, was published on Tuesday by the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).
Among other indiscretions it contained a report that Kadhafi had admitted to Schroeder's top foreign policy advisor, Michael Steiner, that Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin discotheque frequented by US soldiers, in which three people died and around 200 were hurt.
Both the German and Libyan governments have denied that Steiner obtained the admission from Kadhafi but the story has already sent ripples through the foreign ministry and the chancellor's office.
Focus said the US embassy in Berlin had asked the foreign ministry here to "quickly explain" how the paper got hold of the minutes, contained in a wire sent by Germany's ambassador in Washington to his colleagues in Berlin.
The magazine also said it had obtained the full text of the document, and published new tidbits from what it said were comments made by Schroeder and Bush at their meeting.
Bush, according to the weekly, criticized Russian President Vladimir for providing arms to Iran. He and Schroeder also reportedly agreed to freeze millions of dollars in aid to Russia so long as "considerable sums of money are being sent abroad" from that country.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was said to "have lost all contact with reality," while Schroeder reportedly described his meetings in Syria last autumn as "terrible" and said that King Abdullah II of Jordan was "the most powerless leader" in the region.
The German foreign ministry declined to comment on the Focus report. Steiner is due soon to testify before a German court on what Kadhafi said to him, but is expected to deny the topic of the 1986 bombing was ever raised during the talks.
The FAZ report also alleged that Kadhafi had admitted his country's responsibility for the bomb attack that blew a US airliner out of the skies over Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people.
After the bomb exploded at the La Belle discotheque in Berlin in 1986, the then US president, Ronald Reagan, blamed Libya and ordered a bombing attack on the capital, Tripoli, using planes operating from a base in Britain.
Tripoli on Tuesday condemned the report, calling it a plot "aimed at tarnishing Libya's image and its good relations with Germany". Andreas Schulz, a lawyer for victims of the attack, said earlier this month that his law practice had obtained a copy of the communiqué reportedly sent by Chrobog to the foreign ministry in Berlin, giving an official account of a meeting between German and US leaders in Washington in March.
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