Honecker to be freed as charges are dropped

ERICH HONECKER, East Germany's former leader, was last night set to spend his last few hours in jail after a Berlin court dropped manslaughter charges against him in connection with 13 deaths at the Berlin Wall and the former inner-German border.

This morning, another court is expected to drop further charges of embezzlement against Mr Honecker, who will then be free to fly to Chile where he will be reunited with his wife, Margot, and daughter, Sonja.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Bonn said last night that a passport was being prepared for the former Communist leader, aged 80, terminally ill with liver cancer and with less than six months to live.

Mr Honecker's lawyers, who have battled for their client to be released on the grounds of ill health ever since his trial opened in November, said a ticket to Chile had already been booked and arrangements made with a clinic to treat him on arrival.

The decision to drop the manslaughter case against Mr Honecker was taken by the Berlin criminal court after the city's higher constitutional court ruled that his continued detention was in violation of human rights.

In a stinging rebuke to those presiding over the case, the constitutional court said the refusal to release Mr Honecker earlier, in defiance of medical opinion, 'violated his human dignity'.

Referring to doctors' reports saying that Mr Honecker would not live to see the outcome of the trial, the constitutional court said: 'A trial loses its purpose of handing down a binding judgment . . . when, with great probability, the accused will not make it to the end. The trial then becomes self- serving. There are no justified grounds for continuing such proceedings.'

Within hours of the constitutional court's ruling, the court responsible for Mr Honecker's trial dropped the case - thereby ending one of the most extraordinary chapters in German legal history.

When the trial opened in November, it was billed as the most important since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders after the Second World War.

Together with five former members of East Germany's Defence Council, Mr Honecker was accused of issuing the 'shoot-to- kill' orders under which more than 200 East Germans were killed trying to escape to the West after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

With several former East German border guards already tried - and convicted - for their part in some of the killings, the trial against Mr Honecker was seen as the chance to bring those who bore real responsibility to justice. It was also, symbolically, seen as a reckoning with the East German past.

In the event, Mr Honecker, who personally supervised the construction of the Wall, was already too ill to face the full rigours of a trial. Only allowed to attend two three-hourly sessions a week, the once mighty East German leader was a clearly reduced figure in the dock, pathetically forced to hear endless reports about his state of health - and imminent demise - submitted by his defence lawyers.

On only one occasion did Mr Honecker rise to give a proper statement, in which he staunchly defended the values of the country he led from 1971 to 1989 and condemned the proceedings in which he was forced to take part as a 'show trial'.

A bitter critic of German unification, Mr Honecker has always maintained that he wants to spend his last days with his wife, East Germany's former education minister, and daughter, in Chile. Unlike in Germany, he still has many friends there - socialists to whom he gave refuge in East Germany when General Augusto Pinochet came to power in Chile.

(Photograph omitted)