Pubdate: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 Source: Reuters Copyright: 1999 Reuters Limited. GERMAN BORDER GUARDS ACCUSED OF DRUG-DEALING FRANKFURT - police said Friday that at least 25 border guards based in the western town of Frankfurt were being investigated on suspicion of drug-trafficking. Chief police investigator Jochen Zahn told a news conference that the border police officers based at the city's international airport and downtown railway station were suspected of dealing in cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, and marijuana. "It can not be ruled out that other border guards aren't also involved," he said. Three of the suspects, all aged between 20 and 25, have been remanded in custody pending trial. They are accused of using their jobs at the airport to smuggle drugs into the country and distribute them for sale in nightclubs since December 1998. The arrest in May of a drug courier in the northwestern town of Duesseldorf provided the first concrete evidence of the drug-trafficking ring at Frankfurt's airport, Kahn said. The two main suspects, brothers from Croatia, were finally caught when they handed over a suitcase containing $32,660 worth of cocaine to a plainclothes policeman. They had collected the case from a luggage conveyor belt onto which baggage from a plane from South America had been unloaded, Kahn said. The other 22 suspects had worked at the railway station, a stop on many international European lines, and had dealt mainly in the popular clubbers' drug ecstasy. Around 1,600 border guards work at Frankfurt airport, while 400 patrol the train station. Joerg Dietrich Hasslinger, president of the border guards' board, said eight of the suspects had already been suspended. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea