Bern, Switzerland (NZZ, Ger) – Switzerland has forbidden contact between the chief investigator of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Douglas Frantz and Urs Tinner’s lawyer, reports Zurich newspaper NZZ.
Urs Tinner is a member of the Swiss family implicated in the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network affair that surfaced in 2006 and involves several countries. Khan, a citizen of Pakistan and a nuclear bomb scientist, has been accused of being at the centre of a nuclear technology black market. US authorities want to know the extent of the Tinner family’s involvement in the network. The Tinners are a St Gallen family of father and two sons: the father was released by Swiss investigators looking into the possibility that the Tinners sold nuclear infomation to Libya. The two sons were held without charges for several months, and Marco Tinner was finally released on bail in January.
According to an 11 May letter to Frantz from the Swiss Deptartment of Justice and Police, any foreign agent who conducts official business on Swiss soil with a private person, without government permission, faces up to three years in prison.
Background:
- “Des copies des documents détruits refont surface,” Le Temps, 2 April 2009
- “Swiss-CIA family nuclear files destroyed,”, GenevaLunch, 25 Aug 2008
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 18 May 2009.
Filed under: Society
Tags: A.Q. Khan network, CIA, Douglas Frantz, Libya, nuclear proliferation, Pakistan, Senate Foreign Relations Committe, Switzerland, U.S., Urs Tinner
July 13th, 2009 at 11:31 am
[...] Council (cabinet) and the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona are in a curious standoff over the Tinner affair, in which a Swiss father and his two sons were involved with an international ring that was sharing [...]