Gotthard Lerch

Gotthard Lerch (born December 21, 1942 in Upper Silesia ) is a German engineer .

According to international investigators, he was said to have been a member of the nuclear smuggling network of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Kadir Khan . Lerch is said to have contributed to the development of the Libyan nuclear weapons program between 2001 and 2003.

education

Gotthard Lerch studied mechanical engineering and then worked at Dornier. There he acquired knowledge of building gas ultracentrifuges , which are also used for uranium enrichment . After completing his training as a mechanical engineer at the Balthasar Neumann Polytechnic in Würzburg in 1966, he worked at the aircraft manufacturer Dornier in the sound laboratory. In 1968 and 1969 he was a test engineer for vibration technology at Dornier.

In 1971 Lerch moved to the plant engineering company Leybold-Heraeus (LH) in Hanau as a division manager . Thanks to his profound knowledge of vacuum technology, he quickly made a career. On March 12, 1973 he received power of attorney from LH. On September 1, 1973 he became project manager. From 1974 Gotthard Lerch was entrusted with acquisition and maintenance of contacts at LH , afterwards he became head of the profit center. In 1981 he received full prokura at LH. In 1982 Lerch became head of the "Large Metallurgy and Chemical Process Engineering" division. On December 31, 1985 he left LH at his own request and moved to Grabs in Switzerland . In Switzerland Gotthard Lerch founded the "Apparate, Verfahren und Engineering AG" (AVE) based in Buchs .

Processes

Between 1990 and 1992 Gotthard Lerch had to answer for violations of the Foreign Trade Act and the War Weapons Control Act before the Cologne Regional Court . He was accused of supplying the international procurement network of the Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr. Abdul Kadir Khan organized or to have carried out. He was acquitted for lack of evidence. Some allegations were statute-barred, and the Swiss authorities failed to comply with the request for legal assistance from the Cologne Regional Court. In October 2004, he was under an international arrest warrant of the German federal prosecutor at his residence in the Swiss Rhine Valley -site Grabs arrested. The German Federal Prosecutor's Office has been investigating Gotthard Lerch since June 2004, among other things on suspicion of treason . This accusation was then dropped in order to enable Lerch to be extradited to Germany .

On March 17, 2006, the trial against Lerch began at the Mannheim Regional Court . The public prosecutor charged him with violations of the Foreign Trade Act and the War Weapons Control Act . It was alleged that Lerch was a kind of "project manager" for the Libyan nuclear weapons program of the revolutionary leader Muammar al-Gaddafi . According to the indictment , Lerch is said to have planned a piping system for a gas ultracentrifuge system with the help of backers. This allows uranium to be enriched in a weapon- grade manner . On July 26, 2006, the Mannheim case against Lerch broke. The reasons for this were unanswered requests for legal assistance from abroad and the withholding of investigative files.

On October 31, 2007, the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court decided to take over the proceedings against Lerch. The prosecution represents the prosecution . Lerch was silent about the allegations in the Mannheim proceedings. His lawyers tried instead to their clients as victims of an international conspiracy of governments and intelligence agencies represent. On June 5, 2008, the proceedings before the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court began. Completely surprisingly, Lerch made a confession. This was preceded by an agreement between his defense lawyers and the federal prosecutor's office. On October 16, 2008, Lerch was sentenced to five years and six months in prison. He did not have to serve his prison sentence, as his long pre-trial detention and the impairment caused by international reporting were taken into account. Lerch returned to Grabs in Switzerland as a free man .

swell

Books

• Egmont R. Koch : “Nuclear weapons for Al Qaida. 'Dr. No 'and the network of terror ”, Aufbau Verlag 2005
• Douglas Louis Collins, "The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets ... and How We Could Have Stopped Him," Twelve 2007
• Egmond R. Koch: "Boundless Businesses", Publisher: Droemer Knaur (1992)

items

• Steve Coll: "The Atomic Emporium", The New Yorker, August 7, 2006 [1]
• Egmont R. Koch: "The physicist of the mullahs", Frankfurter Rundschau, January 18, 2007 [2]
• Wolfgang Frey and Martin Hähnlein: "A man for brilliant business", Wirtschaft Regional, December 9, 2006 ( PDF )
• Thomas Scheuer: "Delicate chain reaction", FOCUS, December 3, 2007 [3]
• Wolfgang Frey: "Judge breaks the process," SPIEGEL ONLINE, July 26, 2006 [4]

Press releases

• Higher Regional Court Stuttgart, October 16, 2008 [5]
• Federal Prosecutor's Office, November 16, 2004 [6]
• Higher Regional Court Stuttgart, November 14, 2007 [7]