German General Quits Over Airstrike
By NICHOLAS KULISH
NYT
BERLIN — The chief of staff of the German armed forces resigned Thursday over accusations that the military withheld information on a deadly airstrike in Afghanistan in September that killed civilians as well as insurgents.
Germany’s defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, told Parliament that the chief of staff, Gen. Wolfgang Schneiderhan, as well as a senior official in the Defense Ministry, State Secretary Peter Wichert, had tendered their resignations after a German news report that information on civilian casualties had been withheld from the public and from prosecutors.
Their departures set off political tremors in Berlin and within the German military, with the opposition Social Democrats calling for a parliamentary inquiry. Other opposition groups demanded the resignation of Franz Josef Jung, the labor minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, who was the defense minister at the time of the attacks.
On Sept. 4, Col. Georg Klein, then the commander of the German base in the Kunduz region, called in an airstrike against two tanker trucks hijacked by Taliban insurgents. In the aftermath of the attack, Mr. Jung repeatedly claimed that only insurgents had been killed in the attack.
(Continued here.)
NYT
BERLIN — The chief of staff of the German armed forces resigned Thursday over accusations that the military withheld information on a deadly airstrike in Afghanistan in September that killed civilians as well as insurgents.
Germany’s defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, told Parliament that the chief of staff, Gen. Wolfgang Schneiderhan, as well as a senior official in the Defense Ministry, State Secretary Peter Wichert, had tendered their resignations after a German news report that information on civilian casualties had been withheld from the public and from prosecutors.
Their departures set off political tremors in Berlin and within the German military, with the opposition Social Democrats calling for a parliamentary inquiry. Other opposition groups demanded the resignation of Franz Josef Jung, the labor minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, who was the defense minister at the time of the attacks.
On Sept. 4, Col. Georg Klein, then the commander of the German base in the Kunduz region, called in an airstrike against two tanker trucks hijacked by Taliban insurgents. In the aftermath of the attack, Mr. Jung repeatedly claimed that only insurgents had been killed in the attack.
(Continued here.)
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