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Lügde: crime scene campsite (archive photo)
Photo: Guido Kirchner / DPA
The Paderborn public prosecutor has started preliminary investigations in connection with possible file manipulation in the Höxter youth welfare office.
The spokesman for the public prosecutor, Marco Wibbe, confirmed this to SPIEGEL.
"We are currently checking whether there are any indications that point to a criminal act," says Wibbe.
The process had been forwarded to the responsible department head within the public prosecutor's office.
The reason for the preliminary investigations, says Chief Public Prosecutor Wibbe, are corresponding press reports on the proceedings in the Höxter youth welfare office.
The agency was involved in the Lügde abuse case because it was looking after a girl who had been abused by one of the two main perpetrators.
According to statements made by two youth welfare office employees in the investigative committee of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament on the Lügde case, there is a suspicion that documents were subsequently changed in the youth welfare office.
The question was why the youth welfare office had stopped family help for the girl and her mother a year and a half earlier, although there had already been a number of indications of sexual abuse and these had not yet been clarified.
A member of the committee admitted last week that she had only made a note on it when the abuse case was already public.
The chairman of the committee, Martin Börschel (SPD), told SPIEGEL that apparently "files had been changed in a targeted manner."
The committee will now have to devote itself intensively to the processes in Höxter.
Andreas Bialas, the chairman of the SPD in the committee, said that he was checking whether a criminal complaint should also be filed.
A team leader from the youth welfare office also said, "It is normal to go through the files again in such a case and add to them." He definitely sees "investigative approaches".
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