Simm stripped of honors

Mar 13, 2009
from wire reports

Simm was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison for treason.

TALLINN 's Estonian President Toomas Hendrick Ilves has signed a resolution stripping Herman Simm, the former senior Defense Ministry official sentenced to 12.5 years in jail for spying for Russia of the Order of the White Star, Class 4.

The Defense Ministry and the Information Board have also announced that they will strip Simm of further medals and honors.

"The minister of defense has prepared the draft of an order whereby Herman Simm will be stripped of the right to wear the service badge of the Defense Ministry," the ministry's spokesman Martin Jashko told BNS.

Simm has been awarded Class II Service Badge of the Defense Ministry.

The director general of the Information Board, Tarmo Turkson, has already stripped Simm of the service badge of the agency responsible for foreign intelligence in Estonia.

The president also stripped Risto Teinonen of his Estonian decoration. Teinonen, an ethnic Finn who has been under investigation in connection with alleged neo-Nazi activity, was deprived of his Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, 5th Class, for wearing it together with the symbols of a state that has occupied Estonia.

Teinonen received the honor as a Finnish boy scouts leader active in Estonia from then President Lennart Meri in 2001. A year later he was awarded Estonian citizenship for special merit by the government of Prime Minister Mart Laar.

A criminal investigation opened by the Estonian security police over suspicions that Teinonen was assembling neo-Nazis and skinheads to set up an association directed against the Republic of Estonia was ended by prosecutors for the absence of the necessary elements of a criminal offense.

The decision to withdraw his decoration arises from the publication of photographs showing him wearing the Estonian decoration on a Nazi uniform at a private party.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKS:   Delicious   Digg   Reddit   Ask   Facebook   MrWong   Netvouz