Tag Archives: Germany

Eyeing re-election, Germany’s Merkel takes tougher tone on migrants

German Chancellor and leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party CDU Angela Merkel delivers her closing speech of the CDU party convention in Essen, Germany,

By Paul Carrel

ESSEN, Germany (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives toughened their tone on integrating migrants on Wednesday, passing a resolution on tackling forced marriage and honor killings, and cracking down on dual citizenship.

A day after Merkel called for a ban on full-face Muslim veils “wherever legally possible”, her Christian Democrats (CDU) endorsed that message and stressed the values they want the 890,000 migrants who arrived in Germany last year to adopt.

Merkel, who implored the party on Tuesday to help her win a fourth term in office at federal elections next year, told N-TV at the end of a two-day CDU party conference that individual criminals among the migrants must be found and prosecuted.

But she was quick to say: “We must not draw conclusions about the whole group of people seeking protection.”

Neighboring Austria on Sunday rejected a candidate vying to become the first freely elected far-right head of state in Europe since World War Two, halting – at least temporarily – the wave of populism sweeping Western democracies.

In a sign of how much Germany’s “Willkommenskultur”, or welcoming culture, has faded since the 2015 influx, Jens Spahn, a deputy finance minister and senior CDU member, said legal barriers for deportation must be lowered.

“Those who are not refugees, who are not fleeing from Iraq or Syria from war and persecution, must return to their homelands – and that needs to be done consistently,” he told Deutschlandfunk radio.

SWING TO THE RIGHT

Ahead of next year’s election, the CDU is trying to mend fences with its Bavarian ally, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which is tougher on immigration, to try to claw back support lost to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

But Merkel is reluctant to move too far from the center.

In a sign the CDU base is moving to her right, party members adopted a motion to oblige young people who grow up in Germany to foreign parents to decide by the age of 23 whether they will take German nationality or that of their parents’ home country.

The CDU leadership had urged members to reject the motion, which went back on a compromise reached in 2014 with the Social Democrats (SPD), junior party in Merkel’s ruling coalition, allowing those concerned to take two passports at 23 years old.

“Such a step backward into the past will not take place with the SPD,” Katarina Barley, secretary general of the center-left Social Democrats, told the Funke media group. “The CDU has swung to the right at its party congress,” she said.

Reacting to the vote, Merkel showed she is not in lock step with her party base by insisting the 2014 double-passport agreement with the SPD would not be abandoned before next year’s election and that campaigning should not focus on the issue.

She was re-elected chairwoman of the CDU by 89.5 percent of the delegates present at the conference in the western city of Essen, where she was first elected party chairwoman in 2000.

Her score was down from 96.7 percent two years ago but above her lowest winning score of 88.4 percent in 2004, and daily newspaper Bild dubbed the winning margin “Merkel’s little victory”.

An Emnid poll on Sunday showed support for the CDU and CSU at a 10-month high of 37 percent, 15 points ahead of the SPD.

Seeking to claw back ground lost to the AfD, CDU members at the conference adopted a measure calling for forced marriage and honor killings to be “prevented and prosecuted rigorously”.

German police this week detained an Iraqi migrant for suspected rape only days after an Afghan refugee was held in a separate rape and murder case.

Germany has registered some 1,475 child marriages, according to interior ministry figures collected since last year’s influx of migrants. The Justice Ministry said its latest statistics showed there was a conviction for forced marriage in 2014, but that did not necessarily reflect the scale of such crimes.

(Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Germany sees increase in Russian propaganda, cyber attacks

hand in front of computer

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s domestic intelligence agency on Thursday said it had seen a striking increase in Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing German society, and targeted cyber attacks against political parties.

“We see aggressive and increased cyber spying and cyber operations that could potentially endanger German government officials, members of parliament and employees of democratic parties,” Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the domestic BfV intelligence agency, said in statement.

Maassen, who raised similar concerns about Russian efforts to interfere in German elections in an interview with Reuters last month, cited what he called increasing evidence about such efforts and said further cyber attacks were expected.

The agency said it had seen a wide variety of Russian propaganda tools and “enormous use of financial resources” to carry out “disinformation” campaigns aimed at the Russian-speaking community in Germany, political movements, parties and other decision makers.

The goal of the effort was to spread uncertainty in society,”to weaken or destabilize the Federal Republic of Germany,” and to strengthen extremist groups and parties, complicate the work of the federal government and influence political dialogue.

The agency said it had seen a “striking increase” in spea-phishing attacks attributed to a Russian hacking group APT 28, also known as “Fancy Bear” or Strontrium, the same group blamed for the hack of the U.S. Democratic National Committee this year and a cyber attack on the German parliament in 2015.

The attacks were directed against German parties and members of parliament, the agency said, adding they were carried out by government bodies posing as “hacktivists”.

“Propaganda and disinformation, cyber attacks, cyber espionage and cyber sabotage are part of the hybrid threat facing western democracies,” Maassen said.

German officials have accused Moscow of trying to manipulate German media to fan popular angst over issues like the migrant crisis, weaken voter trust and breed dissent within the European Union so that it drops sanctions against Moscow.

But intelligence officials have stepped up their warnings in recent weeks, alarmed about the number of attacks.

Last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she could not rule out Russia interfering in Germany’s 2017 election through Internet attacks and misinformation campaigns.

Russian officials have denied all accusations of manipulation and interference intended to weaken the European Union or to affect the U.S. presidential election.

U.S. intelligence officials had warned in the run-up to the Nov. 8 presidential election of efforts to undermine the credibility of the vote that they believed were backed by the Russian government.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Sabine Siebold; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Worldwide cyber-crime network hit in coordinated raids

Logo of the Cybercrime Intelligence Unit of Germany's Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) Federal Crime Office is pictured during a media day in Wiesbaden, Germany,

BERLIN (Reuters) – One of the world’s biggest networks of hijacked computers, which is suspected of being used to attack online banking customers, has been taken down following police swoops in 10 countries, German police said on Thursday.

In an internationally coordinated campaign, authorities carried out the raids on Wednesday, seized servers and website domains and arrested suspected leaders of a criminal organization, said police and prosecutors in northern Germany.

Officials said they had seized 39 servers and several hundred thousand domains, depriving criminals of control of more than 50,000 computers in Germany alone. These hijacked computers were used to form a “botnet” to knock out other websites.

Two people who are believed to have been the administrators of the botnet infrastructure known as “AVALANCHE” were arrested in Ukraine, investigators said. Another person was arrested in Berlin, officials added.

The strike came in the same week that hackers tried to create the world’s biggest botnet, or an army of zombie computers, by infecting the routers of 900,000 Deutsche Telekom with malicious software.

The attack failed but froze the routers, causing outages in homes, businesses and government offices across Germany on Sunday and Monday, Deutsche Telekom executives said.

Police said criminals had used the “AVALANCHE” botnet targeted in Wednesday’s international raids since 2009 to send phishing and spam emails. More than a million emails were sent per week with malicious attachments or links.

When users opened the attachment or clicked on the link, their infected computers became part of the botnet.

Investigators said the suspects had operated the commandeered network and made it available to other criminal groups, who had used it to send spam and phishing mails, defraud online banking user and to spread ransomware, a form of online extortion scheme.

Officials estimated worldwide damages at upward of several hundred million euros.

Authorities have identified 16 suspected leaders of the organization from 10 different countries.

A court in Verden, northern Germany, has issued arrest warrants for seven people on suspicion of forming a criminal organization, commercial computer fraud and other criminal offences.

The raids came after more than four years of intensive investigation by specialists in 41 countries.

(Reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Alison Williams)

Expect more bird flu cases in Europe and in the U.S

A car drives past the town sign in the northern German village of Grumby, Germany, with the "Bird Flu - off limits area" warning notice

By Sybille de La Hamaide

PARIS (Reuters) – More outbreaks of a severe strain of bird flu in Europe are likely to occur in the next few weeks as wild birds believed to transmit the virus migrate southward, the deputy head of the world animal health body said on Tuesday.

North America, especially the United States where bird flu last year led to the death of about 50 million poultry, should also prepare for new cases, said Matthew Stone, Deputy Director General of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).

Eight European countries and Israel have found cases of the highly contagious H5N8 strain of bird flu in the past few weeks and some ordered that poultry flocks be kept indoors to avoid the disease spreading.

Most outbreaks involved wild birds but Germany, Hungary and Austria also reported cases in domestic duck and turkey farms where all poultry had to be culled.

“From the level of exposure that we have seen to date I would expected more detections, hopefully only in wild birds but it is certainly possible that the presence of this virus in wild birds will create an opportunity for exposure in domestic poultry,” Stone told Reuters in an interview.

“The OIE is very concerned for the impact on our member countries and particularly those where there has been exposure of domestic poultry and where significant control operations are underway,” he added.

Wild birds can carry the virus without showing symptoms of it and transmit it to poultry through their feathers or feces.

The H5N8 virus has never been detected in humans but led to the culling of millions of farm birds in Asia and Europe in 2014.

REDUCING RISKS

In the United States the bird flu crisis last year sent egg prices to all-time highs because of the losses and dozens of countries imposed total or partial bans on U.S. poultry and egg imports.

It would be “no surprise at all” to see new detections in wild birds in North America, Stone said, adding that he hoped the biosecurity framework set up by the U.S. industry and the government would reduce the risk of large-scale outbreaks.

“At this stage we have to take history as our best indicator of what may well play out over the next few months,” Stone said.

Bird flu cannot be transmitted through food. The main risk is of a virus mutating into a form that is transmitted to and between humans, potentially creating a pandemic.

As well as Germany, Hungary, Austria and Israel, Switzerland, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Croatia have also reported outbreaks of the highly pathogenic H5N8 avian influenza, more commonly called bird flu, in recent weeks.

Denmark and the Netherlands have ordered farmers to keep poultry indoors and Germany is considering to do so to protect them from wild birds.

Switzerland said it plans to extend to the entire country precautionary measures to prevent the spread of the virus.

France, which saw its foie gras industry devastated by other strains of the virus earlier this year, has been spared by H5N8 so far but called poultry farmers to increase controls and biosecurity measures.

Since an outbreak of the H5N1 crisis in 2003 when the virus passed on to humans, killing hundreds of them in Asia and Egypt, the OIE’s 180 member countries are bound to report all new occurrences of the disease to the Paris-based organisation.

(Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide; Editing by Gareth Jones)

French foie gras makers worry as bird flu spreads in Europe

Employee holds a duck liver in at a poultry farm in Doazit, Southwestern France,

By Sybille de La Hamaide

PARIS (Reuters) – New outbreaks in Europe of a severe strain of bird flu pose a fresh worry for French foie gras producers, already reeling from lost sales last year when the virus emerged in southwestern France.

The run-up to Christmas coincides with peak demand for the delicacy, France’s favorite festive treat, made from duck or goose liver.

Marie-Pierre Pe from foie gras makers group CIFOG, said on Monday that prices could be 10 percent higher this Christmas after the French government’s decision last year to cull all ducks and geese, and halt output for four months, in a bid to contain the virus.

Farmers hope that stricter measures in place at French farms to spare birds from contamination after last year’s crisis will better protect their industry should the current outbreak of the H5N8 strain, already seen in neighboring Germany and Switzerland and other European countries, hit France.

“When I heard about new bird flu cases in Europe, I thought: It can’t be true, the nightmare is not going to start all over again,” Pe told Reuters.

“We did all that is needed to prepare farmers since the start of the year but we are never immune from birds contaminating a farm,” she said.

Producers estimate the freezing of output had cost the industry around 500 million euros ($539 million), including a 270 million euros loss in sales and additional costs for new biosecurity material.

The 25 percent drop in output and higher costs will lead to the rise in prices of foie gras products this year, Pe said.

Sold whole or as a pate, foie gras is considered a gourmet food in Western and Asian cuisine, but the practice of force-feeding has often been criticized as cruel by animal activists.

CIFOG held regular meetings with farmers this year to explain biosecurity measures put in place after the crisis, such as better protecting food and water from wild birds, Pe said. Farmers in southwestern France, the top foie gras producing region, also face stricter rules to avoid contamination between farms, notably through equipment disinfection.

As well as Germany and Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Croatia, have also reported outbreaks of the highly contagious H5N8 bird flu in recent weeks.

No case of bird flu has been found in France so far this time but the country raised surveillance measures on Thursday to keep wild migrating birds from transmitting the virus to farm poultry.

Denmark ordered farmers to keep their poultry indoors on Monday due to the bird flu threat and Germany said it was considering ordering farmers to keep their flocks inside.

(Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide; Editing by Susan Fenton)

Taliban storm German consulate in Afghan city, four killed

Afghan security forces investigate at the site of explosion near the German consulate office in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

By Abdul Matin and Sabine Siebold

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan/BERLIN (Reuters) – Taliban militants stormed the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, ramming its outer wall with a truck bomb before battling security forces in a late-night attack that killed at least four people, officials said.

The explosion, triggered by a suicide bomber, caused extensive damage to the building and shattered windows as far as 5 km (3 miles) away, a NATO spokesman said. A local doctor said the blast and subsequent firefight also wounded 120 people.

No consular staff were among the victims, but Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germany would review its lead role in the international mission in northern Afghanistan, where violence has escalated sharply during 2016.

Thursday’s attack also underlines one of the tougher foreign policy challenges facing U.S. President-elect Donald Trump when he takes office in January. U.S. combat operations against the Taliban largely ended in 2014, but thousands of its soldiers remain in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.

The Taliban said the attack was in retaliation for NATO air strikes against a village near the northern city of Kunduz last week in which more than 30 people, many of them children, were killed.

Heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent “with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there”, the Islamist militant movement’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone.

Taliban forces came close to over-running Kunduz last month, a year after briefly capturing it in their biggest success in Afghanistan’s 15-year-long war.

HUGE BLAST

The NATO spokesman said at least one vehicle packed with explosives was rammed into the high outer wall surrounding the consulate, but authorities were investigating if a second car had been involved.

“The extent of damage to the city is huge,” said Abdul Razaq Qaderi, deputy police chief of Balkh province. “This kind of an attack, bringing a truck full of explosives and blowing it up in the city, had never happened before.

“The city is still recovering from the shock.”

Noor Mohammad Faiz, the head doctor in Mazar-i-Sharif hospital, said four bodies and 120 wounded, most hurt by flying glass, had been brought to the hospital.

Qaderi said German troops had shot two men on motorcycles who did not comply with orders to stop. German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said that incident was being investigated.

Foreign Minister Steinmeier said six people were killed. All German consular employees were safe and uninjured, he added.

After coordinating the response on Thursday, the government’s crisis task force was meeting again Friday and would review Germany’s role in the Afghan mission.

“It was only possible to defeat the attackers and beat them back after fighting that occurred at the compound and in the building,” Steinmeier said.

Germany, which heads Resolute Support in northern Afghanistan, has about 850 soldiers at a base on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, with another 1,000 troops coming from 20 partner countries.

INTO THE EARLY HOURS

The explosion occurred about an hour before midnight local time, a spokesman for the German military joint forces command in Potsdam said.

Witnesses reported sporadic gunfire from around the consulate and said the blast had shattered windows in a wide area around the compound.

“It was a prepared attack for which we made all arrangements,” the Taliban’s Mujahid said. “First a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden vehicle rammed the main building of the consulate and that enabled other fighters to move in and kill all the foreigners there.”

He said dozens of German soldiers and intelligence personnel were killed in the attack. The Taliban often exaggerate casualties caused by its operations.

After Afghan special forces, German security personnel and NATO’s quick reaction protection force intervened, fighting was over by the early hours of the morning, said Sayed Kamal Sadat, police chief of Balkh.

At least one suspect was arrested from the area of explosion, officials said.

The heavily protected consulate is in a large building close to the Blue Mosque in the center of Mazar-i-Sharif, where the Indian consulate was also attacked by militant gunmen earlier this year.

(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in BERLIN, James Mackenzie, Mirwais Harooni and Hamid Shalizi in KABUL, and Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR; Writing by Andrea Shalal; Editing by John Stonestreet)

Turkey’s Erdogan says Germany has become ‘haven for terrorists’

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan makes a speech during his meeting with mukhtars at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, October 19, 2016. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Palace/

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday Germany had become a haven for terrorists and would be “judged by history”, accusing it of failing to root out supporters of a U.S.-based cleric Ankara blames for July’s failed military coup.

Erdogan said Germany had long harbored militants from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy, and far-leftists from the DHKP-C, which has carried out armed attacks in Turkey.

“We are concerned that Germany, which has protected the PKK and DHKP-C for years, has become the backyard of the Gulenist terror organization,” Erdogan said, referring to the network of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

“We don’t have any expectations from Germany but you will be judged in history for abetting terrorism … Germany has become an important haven for terrorists,” he told a ceremony at his palace in the capital Ankara.

Ankara blames Gulen for the coup attempt and has suspended or dismissed more than 110,000 of his suspected followers from the civil service, security forces and other institutions in a crackdown. Gulen has denied involvement in the putsch.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas told reporters on Tuesday that he did not want to judge whether the Gulenist movement was political in nature or not. He also said Berlin would not extradite suspects if they faced political charges.

“That would certainly not happen,” he said. For any extradition to take place, there had to be firm indications of “classic criminal activity”.

Erdogan said he was concerned by Germany’s reluctance, and warned that “the menace of terrorism would come back and strike it like a boomerang.”

(Reporting by Ece Toksabay and Tuvan Gumrukcu; Madeline Chambers in Berlin; Editing by Nick Tattersall)

At least two dead in explosion at German BASF chemical plant

Firefighters trying to extinguish the chemical fire

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – At least two people died and six were severely injured on Monday in an explosion and fire at chemicals maker BASF’s biggest production site in Germany, the company said.

Two people are still missing, BASF said.

The explosion occurred on a supply line connecting a harbor and a tank depot on the Ludwigshafen site at around 1120 local time (0920 GMT), according to BASF, the world’s biggest chemicals company.

A fire that broke out following the blast sent up plumes of smoke for hours, prompting BASF and the city of Ludwigshafen to urge residents in the surrounding area to avoid going outside and to keep their windows and doors shut.

Measurements taken in the area so far have indicated no risk from toxic fumes, BASF said.

“We deeply regret that employees died and several people were injured. Our sympathy is with the affected people and their families,” the Ludwigshafen site’s chief, Uwe Liebelt, said in a statement.

The company said it was unclear so far what caused the explosion. BASF also said it could not say what financial impact the explosion might have.

It shut down 14 facilities, including its two steam crackers, large units that make basic chemical components, for safety reasons and because the supply of raw materials was disrupted by the blast.

The Ludwigshafen site, around 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Frankfurt, is the world’s largest chemical complex, covering an area of 10 square kilometers (four square miles) and employing 39,000 workers, according to BASF. It is located on the Rhine river and receives many of its raw materials by ship.

The harbor at which the explosion occurred is a terminal for combustible fluids such as naphtha and methanol that are important for BASF’s supply of raw materials.

News of the explosion came less than two hours after BASF said four people were injured in a gas explosion at its Lampertheim facility, a plant near Ludwigshafen that makes additives for plastics.

(Reporting by Jans Hack and Maria Sheahan; Editing by Larry King and Jane Merriman)

Merkel wants Germany to get refugees into workforce faster

Refugees show their skills in metal processing works during a media tour at a workshop for refugees organized by German industrial group Siemens in Berlin, Germany,

By Georgina Prodhan and Andreas Rinke

FRANKFURT/BERLIN (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday that Germany needed “viable solutions” to integrate refugees into the workforce faster after she met blue-chip companies that have hired just over 100 refugees since around a million arrived last year.

Merkel, her popularity undermined by her open-door policy, summoned the bosses of some of Germany’s biggest companies to Berlin on Wednesday to account for their lack of action and exchange ideas about how they can do better.

Many of the companies contend that a lack of German-language skills, the inability of most refugees to prove any qualifications and uncertainty about their permission to stay in the country mean there is little they can do in the short term.

Merkel told rbb-inforadio that if needed, special provisions could be developed to speed up the integration of refugees into the workforce, but she acknowledged this would still take time.

“Many are in integration courses or waiting to get on them. So I think we will need to show some patience, but must be ready at any time to develop viable solutions,” she said.

A participant at the meeting with Merkel said company executives from DAX firms and small businesses discussed their opinions for 2-1/2 hours and came to the conclusion: “We want to do this”. When talking about the refugee influx, Merkel frequently says: “Wir schaffen das” or “we can do this”.

The meeting spurred some firms to announce more action to help get refugees into the workforce.

Deutsche Bahn [DBN.UL] boss Ruediger Grube said IT would offer 150 extra places in qualification programs for refugees, Volkswagen said it was working with Kiron, a non-profit start-up, to help refugees start a university degree, Thyssenkrupp announced around 150 extra training positions and Daimler announced 50, the source said.

“Wir Zusammen” or “We Together”, an integration initiative of German companies, said much had been achieved to support the arrival of the newcomers but now they had to turn their attention to integrating them into the workforce.

“Now it’s about motivating those companies that are not yet active,” it said in a statement after the summit.

A survey by Reuters of the 30 companies in Germany’s stock index last week found they could point to just 63 refugee hires in total.

Of those, 50 were employed by Deutsche Post DH, which said it applied a “pragmatic approach” and deployed the refugees to sort and deliver letters and parcels.

“Given that around 80 percent of asylum seekers are not highly qualified and may not yet have a high level of German proficiency, we have primarily offered jobs that do not require technical skills or a considerable amount of interaction in German,” a company spokesman said by email.

Deutsche Post’s Chief Executive Frank Appel said on Wednesday the company had now hired more refugees, taking its total to 102.

Several of the 27 firms who responded said they considered it discriminatory to ask about applicants’ migration history, so they did not know whether they employed refugees or how many.

What is clear is that early optimism that the wave of migrants might boost economic growth and help ease a skills shortage in Germany – where the working-age population is projected to shrink by 6 million people by 2030 – is evaporating.

“The employment of refugees is no solution for the skills shortage,” industrial group Thyssenkrupp’s Chief Executive Heinrich Hiesinger said earlier this month.

APPRENTICESHIP BARRIERS

Most large German companies, especially those in manufacturing, prefer to hire through structured apprenticeship programs, in which they train young people for up to four years for highly skilled and sometimes company-specific jobs.

But the recent arrivals from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are mainly ill-prepared for such training, they say.

The DAX-listed companies surveyed by Reuters were able to identify about 200 apprentices in this or last year’s intake. Many will have been through months of pre-training especially designed for migrants by large companies, such as engineering group Siemens, Mercedes maker Daimler, or automotive technology firm Continental.

Two Syrian interns visited by Reuters at a Siemens power-plant construction site in April applied for apprenticeships, but could not immediately be accepted because they are still in the process of proving their school-leaving qualifications. One is meantime doing temporary work in IT and the other taking German classes.

It is simply too soon to expect large numbers of refugees to have been hired yet, most German companies say.

“Our experience is that it takes a minimum of 18 months for a well-trained refugee to go through the asylum procedure and learn German at an adequate level in order to apply for a job,” said a spokeswoman for Deutsche Telekom.

(Additional reporting by Caroline Copley, Michelle Martin, Paul Carrel, Andreas Rinke and Markus Wacket in Berlin, Jan Schwartz in Hamburg, Matthias Inverardi in Duesseldorf and Harro ten Wolde, Ludwig Burger, Edward Taylor and Tina Bellon in Frankfurt; editing by Ralph Boulton)

North Korea conducts fifth and largest nuclear test, drawing broad condemnation

South Korean emergency meeting

* Test seen as North’s most powerful yet

* Japan protests, sends jets to monitor for radiation

* China begins emergency radiation testing

* South accuses North of “maniacal recklessness”

* UN Security Council to hold closed-door meeting Friday –
dips

(Adds UN, CTBTO estimate, further condemnations)

By Ju-min Park and Jack Kim

SEOUL, Sept 9 (Reuters) – North Korea conducted its fifth
and biggest nuclear test on Friday and said it had mastered the
ability to mount a warhead on a ballistic missile, ratcheting up
a threat that its rivals and the United Nations have been
powerless to contain.

The blast, on the 68th anniversary of North Korea’s
founding, was more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
according to some estimates, and drew condemnation from the
United States as well as China, Pyongyang’s main ally.

Diplomats said the United Nations Security Council would
discuss the test at a closed-door meeting on Friday, at the
request of the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Under 32-year-old dictator Kim Jong Un, North Korea has
accelerated the development of its nuclear and missile
programmes, despite U.N. sanctions that were tightened in March
and have further isolated the impoverished country.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye, in Laos after a summit
of Asian leaders, said Kim was showing “maniacal recklessness”
in completely ignoring the world’s call to abandon his pursuit
of nuclear weapons.

U.S. President Barack Obama, aboard Air Force One on his way
home from Laos, said the test would be met with “serious
consequences”, and held talks with Park and with Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe, the White House said.

China said it was resolutely opposed to the test and urged
Pyongyang to stop taking any actions that would worsen the
situation. It said it would lodge a protest with the North
Korean embassy in Beijing.

There were further robust condemnations from Russia, the
European Union, NATO, Germany and Britain.

North Korea, which labels the South and the United States as
its main enemies, said its “scientists and technicians carried
out a nuclear explosion test for the judgment of the power of a
nuclear warhead,” according to its official KCNA news agency.

It said the test proved North Korea was capable of mounting
a nuclear warhead on a medium-range ballistic missile, which it
last tested on Monday when Obama and other world leaders were
gathered in China for a G20 summit.

Pyongyang’s claims of being able to miniaturise a nuclear
warhead have never been independently verified.

Its continued testing in defiance of sanctions presents a
challenge to Obama in the final months of his presidency and
could become a factor in the U.S. presidential election in
November, and a headache to be inherited by whoever wins.

“Sanctions have already been imposed on almost everything
possible, so the policy is at an impasse,” said Tadashi Kimiya,
a University of Tokyo professor specialising in Korean issues.

“In reality, the means by which the United States, South
Korea and Japan can put pressure on North Korea have reached
their limits,” he said.

UNPRECEDENTED RATE

North Korea has been testing different types of missiles at
an unprecedented rate this year, and the capability to mount a
nuclear warhead on a missile is especially worrisome for its
neighbours South Korea and Japan.

“The standardisation of the nuclear warhead will enable the
DPRK to produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of
smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher
strike power,” KCNA said, referring to the country’s formal
name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

It was not clear whether Pyongyang had notified Beijing or
Moscow of its planned nuclear test. Senior officials from
Pyongyang were in both capitals this week.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she
had no information to provide when asked if China had advance
warning of the test, and would not be drawn on whether China
would support tougher sanctions against its neighbour.

Although Beijing has criticised North Korea’s nuclear and
missile tests, it has repeatedly expressed anger since the
United States and South Korea decided in July to deploy the
Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system
in the South.

China calls THAAD a threat to its own security and will do
nothing to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table on
its nuclear programme.

Preliminary data collected by the Vienna-based Comprehensive
Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which monitors
nuclear tests around the world, indicates the magnitude – around
5 – of the seismic event detected in North Korea on Friday was
greater than a previous one in January.

Jeffrey Lewis of the California-based Middlebury Institute
of International Studies said the highest estimates of seismic
magnitude suggested this was North Korea’s most powerful nuclear
test so far.

He said the seismic magnitude and surface level indicated a
blast with a 20- to 30-kilotonne yield. Such a yield would make
this test larger than the nuclear bomb dropped by the United
States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two.

“That’s the largest DPRK test to date, 20-30kt, at least.
Not a happy day,” Lewis told Reuters.

South Korea’s military put the force of the blast at 10
kilotonnes, which would still be the North’s most powerful
nuclear blast to date.

“The important thing is, that five tests in, they now have a
lot of nuclear test experience. They aren’t a backwards state
any more,” Lewis said.

(Reporting by Jack Kim, Ju-min Park, James Pearson, Se Young
Lee, Nataly Pak, and Yun Hwan Chae in SEOUL; Additional
reporting by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING, Kaori Kaneko and Linda
Sieg in TOKYO, Kirsti Knolle in VIENNA and Eric Beech and
Michelle Nichols in WASHINGTON; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing
by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Ian Geoghegan)