Investigators raid German telecom giant in spy probe

Prosecutors raided Deutsche Telekom's headquarters on Thursday in a probe into an escalating scandal that has seen Europe's biggest phone company confess to spying on journalists.

"Since this morning there have been investigative procedures" at the Deutsche Telekom offices, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Bonn said.

Deutsche Telekom was forced to concede at the weekend that it had hired an outside firm to track hundreds of thousands of phone calls by senior executives and journalists to identify the sources of press leaks.

The Bonn-based company said the "ill-advised use of communications data" happened in 2005 and probably 2006 and has to date conceded only to spying on the magazine Capital.

But on Thursday the Financial Times Deutschland alleged that it became a victim of espionage by Deutsche Telekom several years earlier.

The daily alleged in a front-page report that Deutsche Telekom had hired private detectives to spy on its reporters in 2000 and had even secretly filmed the newsroom.

"Their main target was the FTD's chief reporter at the time, Tasso Enzweiler, who often broke stories about the telecommunication sector.

"The private detectives even used a hidden camera to try and get information about Enzweiler's source from the news room in Cologne," the newspaper said. Full article