Discipline was even worse than feared on a three-masted German navy training ship at the centre of a scandal that has put the defence minister under pressure, media reports said on Tuesday. The new allegations reportedly include death threats and aggressive sexual harassment against cadets on the Gorch Fock, the vessel at the centre of a spiralling scandal facing Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.
The sailing ship hit the headlines last week when it emerged that cadets had refused orders to climb the rigging after a 25-year-old female trainee, Sara Lena Seele, plunged 27 metres (89 feet) to her death off Salvador de Bahia in Brazil last November. Zu Guttenberg has suspended Commander Schatz pending an enquiry into the alleged mutiny. Opposition leaders have accused the minister of seeking a scapegoat to cover up his own failure to shed light on the case.
Trainers joked to one cadet that they were members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a gang and organised crime syndicate active in prisons in the United States keen on Nazi symbols, Spiegel magazine reported on its website. The same cadet was approached by several trainers in the showers while the Gorch Fock was in the port of Las Palmas and instructed to pick up a shampoo bottle, telling him "being on the ship is like being in prison."
Trainers and other regular crew members were regularly inebriated on board, with officers "shamelessly drunk" during a stopover in an unnamed foreign port, setting off fire alarms and forcing a trainee to clear up vomit. The captain of the ship, Norbert Schatz, who has since been suspended, was "seen in swimming trunks particularly often," only taking part in the absolute minimum of duties.
Other officers spent much of their time sunbathing, with many on board behaving "like kings" towards the cadets, the Bild daily reported. Other trainees complained of their personal belongings being stolen.
Spiegel and Bild said the comments were made by cadets to a parliamentary commission headed by Hellmut Koenigshaus, who presented an annual report on abuses on the military on Tuesday. Koenigshaus told reporters that his 2010 report contained nothing on the Gorch Fock - he said he had had a "good impression" of the ship - but that 80 former cadets on the ship have been interviewed since it was written.
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