Bericht Aus Deutschland

Pakistani national Amir Abdu Rehaman Cheema was arrested in Berlin for attacking a newspaper editor for printing the 12 Muhammad cartoons. Now German officials say he "committed suicide" whilst in custody.

Amir’s father Nazir Cheema told [Geo television] that a Foreign Office official had telephoned him on Thursday and told him about his son’s death while in police custody.

Cheema said Amir’s body would be handed over to the Pakistani embassy in Berlin on Monday for sending to Pakistan. He lamented the government could take no action, saying, Pakistan would accept whatever German officials say.

Foreign Office Spokesperson Tasneem Aslam confirmed the incident. Pakistan has asked Germany for details of the incident, she said. "German officials' note to the embassy in Berlin read: Amir Cheema committed suicide in the prison by hanging himself with a rope," she added.

Not that I'm especially troubled by it -- yet -- but it seems there's a lot of that going around in European prisons. Real ones, run by Europeans, that is -- not the Pulitzer-Prize-winning rumors of illegal US renditions for which top EU officials Gijs de Vries and Xavier Solana can find no hard evidence.

In contrast, not one Gitmo detainee has died in US custody, by "suicide" or otherwise. The Cheema family must wonder where Amnesty International, the ICRC, the UN, CNN, and all the other usual tranzi hysterics are.

Another mixed-bag story: the good news is, two German engineers kidnapped in Iraq in January have been released unharmed. The bad news is . . . all together now . . . how much?

The German government handed over a "large amount" to the kidnappers of two German engineers held hostage in Iraq for over four months and set free on Tuesday, Iraq's ambassador to Germany, Alaa al-Hashimi, has alleged. "Regarding the payment of a ransom, I don't know, but I assume it was a large amount of money," the ambasssador told German's ARD public television network, stressing that the Iraqi government had played part in the men's release.

However, al-Hashimi's claim is likely to trigger further debate on the wisdom of paying for the release of hostages. While the official policy of Britain and the United States is that Western governments should refuse to negotiate with kidnappers, Germany, France and Italy are believed to have paid million dollar sums for the release of kidnapped nationals.

. . . At the time of the men's capture, there was speculation that Germans were being targeted, because Berlin, unlike Washington or London, paid ransoms.

A month before the two engineers were kidnapped, German diplomats admitted the government had paid five million dollars for the [release of] Susanne Osthoff. According to a report by the German weekly magazine Focus, Nitzschke and Braeunlich's kidnappers had demanded a 12 million dollar ransom for their release.

Funny how the three EU countries that pay ransoms also boast some of the worst economic conditions on the continent. (Respectively, German, French, and Italian GDP growth: 0.9%, 1.6%, 0%; and unemployment: 12.1%, 9.6%, 7.9%). Apparently taking Econ 101 automatically disqualifies Europeans from public office. So here's lesson #1: subsidize something -- agricultural surpluses, hostage-taking -- and you will get more of it.