Plutonium Smugglers Convicted in Germany : Europe: Two Spaniards, Colombian receive relatively light sentences. Official entrapment is alleged.

A German judge on Monday convicted two Spaniards and a Colombian of smuggling plutonium into Germany but gave them relatively light sentences, bolstering widespread complaints here that the spectacular nuclear materials case was stage-managed from the start by overeager German intelligence agents.

Judge Heinz Alert of the Bavarian state court in Munich ruled that German undercover agents, masquerading as potential buyers of black-market nuclear-weapons components, had played a key role in persuading the smugglers to bring their lethal wares into Germany. But the judge also found the degree of police provocation to be acceptable under German law.

The court’s decision came almost a year after two of the smugglers flew from Moscow to Munich on a regularly scheduled Lufthansa flight, carrying 12.8 ounces of highly toxic plutonium hidden in their luggage. Police and intelligence agents were monitoring their travels and arrested them as they exited the plane at the busy Munich airport. The third man was arrested at a Munich hotel.

The widely publicized arrests and the seizure of the plutonium--enough, according to one expert, to contaminate the entire German ground water supply--set off a frenzy of international speculation that black marketeers were filching dangerous nuclear materials from poorly protected stockpiles in the former Soviet Union and preparing to deliver them to terrorists or rogue governments for use in making a bomb.

The German government responded to this perceived threat by rushing a team of senior officials to Moscow to negotiate greater cooperation between the two countries on the prevention of smuggling.

Although officials in Moscow met with the German team, they ridiculed the smuggling fears at the same time, arguing that they believed their military nuclear stockpiles were in order, that the plutonium had come from somewhere else and that Germany had cooked up the dramatic bust as a way of tarring Russia’s reputation and gaining control over its nuclear industry.

Diplomats from Colombia also complained, saying that the arrested Colombian, a businessman, had been enticed into the smuggling operation by a German undercover agent offering $237 million for the plutonium.

German opposition parties agreed that the case smelled of entrapment. The bust happened at the height of an election season, they noted, and offered the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl an opportunity to look tough on crime.

The repeated complaints have persuaded the German Bundestag, or Parliament, to open an inquiry into possible official wrongdoing in the affair. The pilot of the Lufthansa plane also has begun legal proceedings in an attempt to learn who let the smugglers bring plutonium aboard a commercial airliner filled with unsuspecting passengers and crew.

On Monday, the judge sentenced Justiniano Torres of Colombia to four years and 10 months imprisonment. Torres’ accomplices, the Spaniards Julio Oroz and Javier Bengoechea, received sentences of three years and 10 months, and three years, respectively. All three confessed to smuggling the plutonium but based their defense on claims of police enticement.

Prosecutors in the case had asked for longer sentences. Violations of Germany’s weapons-control laws carry sentences of up to 10 years.

In his ruling, Judge Alert said there were enough questions about police behavior to warrant the lesser sentences urged by the trio’s defense lawyers. The authorities had “approached dangerous boundaries,” he said.

Alert excluded any possibility of outright illegal police activity, however. He said that the police were operating under tremendous time pressure as the smuggling scheme unfolded and that, under these circumstances, their provocation “can be looked upon as permissible.”

The Bundestag investigation of the incident has adjourned for the summer. But one member of the committee said Monday’s ruling will give it new impetus when members return in September.

“The verdict disproves the federal government’s current and past version [of the undercover operation], and it confirms our earlier suspicions,” said Hermann Bachmaier, the opposition Social Democratic Party’s spokesman on the investigation committee.