Around 900 e-mails from the situation center of the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of the Interior have been delivered to the state parliament’s flood catastrophe investigation committee. The delivery of files on Wednesday also includes information that should indisputably have been submitted directly, the Ministry of the Interior in Mainz announced on Thursday. However, it did not provide any information about the content.
The head of the internal auditing group set up by Interior Minister Michael Ebling (SPD) around the judge and former State Secretary from Saarland, Christian Seel (CDU), comes to the conclusion in his first partial report that it is not apparent that files or data were intentionally compromised had not been submitted.
About 20 of the 900 e-mails subsequently delivered relate to the flood night of 14/15. July 2021. But for the most part it is about July 16th to August 6th. Many documents were only classified on the basis of a re-examination in such a way that they had to be submitted to the committee of inquiry. Among them are certainly already known mails. About every third of the 900 e-mails sent later deal with the management of the emergency services after July 16th. Weather reports that were recorded several days after the flood night were also subsequently delivered.
According to Seel’s report, there are no objections to the completeness checks carried out by the “submission-obligatory bodies”. These include the police headquarters in Trier and Koblenz, the police headquarters for operations in logistics and technology, the State Criminal Police Office, the situation center and the responsible department in the Ministry of the Interior. “Ultimately, it cannot be ruled out that there is individual data that was not found,” says the report. But this is not objectionable. “The procedures used by the police authorities appear comprehensible and offer sufficient security to process the considerable amount of data and files.”
The chairman of the opposition Free Voters in the investigative committee, Stephan Wefelscheid, emphasized: “It is now an abstract question of how the state government deals with the parliamentary control of the government.” Because: “If the e-mails that were subsequently delivered had been sent to the committee of inquiry in a timely manner, the committee of inquiry would have proceeded very differently.” The subsequent delivery is not due to the state government, but to the fact that the state government committee gave up checking the files again due to the sudden appearance of the helicopter videos from the flood night. “It’s a scandal that bits and pieces of new documents are now appearing.”
Dealing with the videos and documents that emerged led to the resignation of Interior Minister Roger Lewentz (SPD).
