GERMAN SPY TRIAL

Evening Star, Issue 19781, 3 February 1928, Page 7

GERMAN SPY TRIAL

THE ZINOVIEFF LETTER MERTENS’S STATEMENTS DENIED. Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright BERLIN, February .1. (Received February 3, at 1 a.m.) A message from Leipzig states that Schreck denies that he was concerned in the Zinovieff letter. The public prosecutor, in demanding sentences of ten years lor Schreck, two years for his associate Kich, and six months for Schultz, said it was evident from Mertens’s testimony that very dangerous things went on in the dark room of No. 1. Anhalstrasse, where Schreck and Mertens lived. [The trial was begun afc Leipzig on January 11 of Johann Schreck, who was alleged to be the most dangerous spy in Europe. The famous letter from Zinovieff, which figured in the last General Election in Britain, was referred to on the resumption this week of the trial of Schreck, who was charged with betraying military secrets to a foreign Power. Karl Mertens, a German pacifist, who is living in Geneva as a political fugitive,, and who was granted a safe conduct and immunity from arrest in order to attend the trial, created a sensation when he said in evidence that a Polish spy, Paciorkovski, who was employed at the Embassy in Berlin, had forged the Zinovieff letter. Schreck said he was then living in the same boarding house as the Pole, and helped him to draw up the letter while he was committing his own forgeries.]