GERMAN BORDER GUARDS ACCUSED OF DRUG-DEALING

FRANKFURT - police said Friday that at least 25
border guards based in the western town of Frankfurt were being
investigated on suspicion of drug-trafficking.

Chief police investigator Jochen Zahn told a news conference that the
border police officers based at the city's international airport and
downtown railway station were suspected of dealing in cocaine,
ecstasy, LSD, and marijuana.

"It can not be ruled out that other border guards aren't also
involved," he said.

Three of the suspects, all aged between 20 and 25, have been remanded
in custody pending trial.

They are accused of using their jobs at the airport to smuggle drugs
into the country and distribute them for sale in nightclubs since
December 1998.

The arrest in May of a drug courier in the northwestern town of
Duesseldorf provided the first concrete evidence of the
drug-trafficking ring at Frankfurt's airport, Kahn said.

The two main suspects, brothers from Croatia, were finally caught when
they handed over a suitcase containing $32,660 worth of cocaine to a
plainclothes policeman.

They had collected the case from a luggage conveyor belt onto which
baggage from a plane from South America had been unloaded, Kahn said.

The other 22 suspects had worked at the railway station, a stop on
many international European lines, and had dealt mainly in the popular
clubbers' drug ecstasy.

Around 1,600 border guards work at Frankfurt airport, while 400 patrol
the train station. Joerg Dietrich Hasslinger, president of the border
guards' board, said eight of the suspects had already been suspended.