Secret Agent Mauss Completely Cleared

Wochenspiegel, 27.05.1998

No laws broken: secret agent Mauss completely cleared

19 months after the arrest in Colombia, the Prosecutor General in Bogotá has also decided that no laws were broken. Secret agent Mauss completely cleared

Agent Mauss had always declared his innocence

Wrongfully arrested due to intrigues and false suspicions

District/Bogotá (cen). Success for the secret agent from the Hunsruck, Werner Mauss (58). The Colombian judiciary has now suspended its proceedings against the mysterious agent and his wife Ida (37). Mauss had declared his innocence all along. Now the judicial authorities in Bogotá have confirmed this. The married couple had broken no Colombian laws and had been “engaged in a special humanitarian mission on behalf of the German and Colombian governments”, according to the Prosecutor General. The German government had defended Mauss’s role in Colombia after his arrest, describing it as a “humanitarian operation”. At his arrest on November 17 1996 he had a “letter of safe conduct” from the German government in his possession.

He and his wife had been engaged in trying to get a hostage, who had been freed by themselves, out of the country. Mauss had negotiated the release of Brigitte Schoene, wife of a German executive, who was then freed without ransom money being paid. According to the agent this had only been possible because of the ELN guerrillas willingness for peace. Following his arrest Mauss had been accused by the public prosecutor’s office, on the basis of manipulated statements by witnesses, of having planned the kidnapping himself. In the meantime those involved in the intrigue are themselves under investigation.

The “Mauss case” has caused such a stir because the German government had provided backing for Mauss’s Colombian mission. He had been issued with real passports with different identities by the German authorities. These were later accepted as genuine by Colombia. Mauss was in constant contact with government intelligence services coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer, who was politically responsible for the special mission.

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