Bonn’s New Interior Minister Vows to Clear Up Shootout Scandal : Germany: Parliament hears pledge. Death of suspect at the hands of nation’s elite anti-terrorist unit is at issue.

The German Parliament met in special session Monday to watch Manfred Kanther being sworn in as the country’s new interior minister and, in the debate that followed, heard him vow to clear up the scandal that brought him into the Cabinet--the killing of a terrorist suspect two weeks ago.

“The government wants a fast and complete clarification of all circumstances, as fast as possible, without any ifs, ands or buts,” Kanther told lawmakers in Bonn. “That will happen.”

His pledge came 15 days after members of the country’s elite anti-terrorist unit, known as the GSG-9, confronted two suspected members of the violent leftist Red Army Faction in a shootout at a railroad station in the northern town of Bad Kleinen. The June 27 gun battle left one of the suspects and a security agent dead, and a string of troubling questions surrounding the incident unanswered.

Initial contradictory official accounts of the shootout, followed by more confusion and a string of terse “no comments,” gradually cast a pall of suspicion over the incident, while the statement of one security agent--as yet unconfirmed--has raised the possibility that the GSG-9 unit may have executed the suspect, Wolfgang Grams, after overpowering him.

The continued inability of the government to put together an accurate, detailed account of the action or to shed any light on exactly how Grams died more than two weeks after the fact has turned what at first seemed to be a significant coup by the GSG-9 into an embarrassing scandal.

So far, it has brought two resignations, generated unexpected sympathy for the Red Army Faction and raised questions about the future of one of Europe’s most respected anti-terrorist forces.

Kanther, 54, an urbane former interior minister for the state of Hesse, spent much of his first day in office trying to restore credibility to the investigative effort.

“The trust of people has been damaged by extremely contradictory information,” Kanther said in a nationally televised interview Monday evening. “This trust must be won back by an unconditional, open investigation.”

But all three parties in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s center-right coalition rejected a call for a special parliamentary investigative panel.

Kanther was brought into the Cabinet after the resignation eight days ago of Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters, who initially declared the Bad Kleinen action a success and then suddenly resigned, accepting political responsibility for the bureaucratic confusion.

Federal Prosector Alexander von Stahl, who approved the GSG-9 operation, was also forced to take early retirement.