A former regional German migration official under investigation over allegations of having granted asylum to some 1,200 migrants in exchange for bribes has been left in the lurch by those who should be ensuring her fair treatment, her lawyer said on Saturday.
It was not right that “those who are entrusted with her welfare, that is, her superiors, including the [interior] minister, now make accusations without listening to her legal case,” Erich Joester told broadcasters Radio Bremen and NDR and the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Joester rejected the allegations that his client, identified under German privacy laws only as Ulrike B., had accepted money from asylum applicants, calling them “nonsense.”
He also denied that she had paid money to lawyers so asylum-seekers were deliberately taken to the northern city of Bremen, where she was in charge of the regional branch of Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), to have their applications filed. He said such transfers had occurred, but that this was done with the knowledge of BAMF headquarters in Nuremberg because other regional offices had been unable to cope with the number of applications made.
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