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The former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution testified before parliament. This shows a lot about what the FPÖ planned to do with the authority. Kickl avoided making the statement.
Vienna – An investigative committee of the Austrian Parliament actually wanted to question FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl on Wednesday (May 8th). But he canceled because he was on vacation, the FPÖ candidate for chancellor said. According to him, it was still in the morning Austria Press Agency (APA) unclear whether anyone could be questioned at all. The investigative committee, in the middle of an election year, is supposed to investigate “abuse of power” by ministers from the FPÖ and SPÖ. Most recently, however, MPs were mainly concerned with the espionage affair surrounding the suspected Russian spy Egisto Ott in the Austrian domestic intelligence service (BVT). His former boss Peter Gridling was questioned in the afternoon.
Central points of the Ott affair and the associated BVT affair involving a raid on the authority that was allegedly controlled by the Interior Ministry, which was then led by Kickl, fall during the FPÖ leader’s term of office. Gridling was able to provide information on some aspects of this now far-reaching affair and brought in some new details. Ott is currently in custody. He is accused of being part of the core of a spy ring controlled by former Wirecard manager Jan Marsalek, together with former BVT department head Martin Weiss, who went into hiding in Dubai.
German State Secretary and Wirecard lobbyist had full access to Austria’s intelligence service
On Wednesday it became a little clearer what the former German State Secretary for Intelligence in the Federal Chancellery Klaus-Dieter Fritsche (CSU), who also worked as a Wirecard lobbyist, had to do with the reform of the BVT as an external consultant. Gridling also gave an unsurprising clue as to how the spy Ott was able to illegally query hundreds of data sets, including dozens of left-wing activists, including Germans. Gridling also described his impression of the raid and revealed details from his cooperation with the blue Ministry of the Interior, which give a further impression of what the FPÖ planned to do with the authority. The restructuring of the BVT was stopped by Kickl, the Ibiza affair and the end of the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition under Sebastian Kurz.
Fritsche was, the newspaper quoted default Gridling from the investigative committee was the first external consultant to ever work for the BVT on a fee basis. Kickl brought Fritsche to Vienna in 2019. After a security check, he had full access to the authority’s files. According to Yannick Shetty, leader of the liberal NEOS parliamentary group in the committee, Fritsche was also allowed to question all BVT employees at any time. Fritsche told the German Bundestag’s Wirecard investigative committee that he was merely a “door opener” to the federal government for Wirecard and that he never met Marsalek during that time. That’s what he reported Bavarian Radio.
Espionage scandal in Austria: Suspected Marsalek spy should control other suspected Marsalek spy
Gridling further explained who was responsible for stopping Ott’s illegal data queries. Ott is said to have queried around 400 people in various European police and intelligence service databases and passed them on in some cases, where it is unclear. According to information from the Standard, these included 24 left-wing activists. The portal day one reported that German citizens were also affected. An answer to a small question from the left-wing Bundestag member Martina Renner to the federal government is still pending on the matter. Gridling explained on Wednesday that there had been spot checks during the queries, which the respective department management should have implemented together with the legal department. However, the department head above Ott was his suspected accomplice Weiss.
When the BVT house search took place in 2018, Gridling perceived it as “quite disorganized,” said Gridling. The officers of a police unit, founded on Kickl’s initiative and led by a former FPÖ politician, did not really know what they were looking for, he quoted default the then BVT boss. The head of the extremism department said in April that a printout of an email between the FPÖ police officers and the neo-Nazi Gottfried Küssel had disappeared during the raid. Küssel is considered a key figure in the German-speaking neo-Nazi scene.
Udo Landbauer, the songbook affair and the paranoia of the FPÖ
Gridling also repeated an old accusation that the highest official in Kickl’s Interior Ministry had tried to get him to release information about undercover investigators in right-wing extremist fraternities. This may be due to a certain paranoia on the part of the FPÖ after the so-called songbook affair. The Vienna weekly newspaper published in 2018 butterfly Excerpts from the songbook of the fraternity of the Lower Austrian FPÖ leader Udo Landbauer. Among other anti-Semitic, racist and Nazi-glorifying texts, it said: “Give it gas, you old Germans, we will make the seventh million.” A call to continue the Holocaust that is also punishable in Austria.
Landbauer’s FPÖ is now the junior partner of the right-wing conservative ÖVP in the Lower Austrian state government. At the time, the FPÖ spun conspiracy stories that the BVT had specifically played the songbook to the media during the election campaign. Gridling said in the investigative committee that he tried to give as little information to Kickl’s staff. The FPÖ is riddled with German nationalist fraternities who have never gotten over the end of German-Austrian unity under National Socialism.
FPÖ started “secret projects” in Austria’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution
Gridling said he had little to do with Kickl himself. An interior minister who keeps his intelligence chief at a distance seems unusual. However, two “secret projects” sound suspicious, he says default was questioned by the ÖVP. Kickl’s highest official in the Ministry of the Interior initially wanted to create two new structures in the BVT without Gridling’s knowledge: one for “analysis” and one for “information gathering”. The FPÖ wanted to rebuild the domestic intelligence service bypassing the top authorities. If the coalition had not broken up, this would probably have been pursued in the same way as the secret service that the FPÖ wanted to set up in the Foreign Ministry. A former FPÖ MP promised Ott a position in one of the two authorities, the daily newspaper reported Press as early as 2022.
It is considered unlikely that Kickl himself will have to testify before the investigative committee a second time. The committee’s work must end before the summer break, and the mandate ends with the new parliamentary elections. In the Austria Press Agency’s election trend for the National Council election, the FPÖ is clearly ahead with around 28 percent. However, the party was unable to translate this trend into election results in the local elections in Salzburg and Innsbruck. Similar to that AfD In Germany, the FPÖ is already constantly agitating against the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. (kb)
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