A German court has acquitted two Dutch journalists - who secretly filmed an interview with a 90-year-old former Nazi SS assassin - on charges of breaching German privacy laws.

"The two journalists have been acquitted," a spokesman for the court in Eschweiler in western Germany told AFP news agency.

The two TV journalists, from Dutch current affairs programme Een Vandaag, had faced up to three years in prison on charges of recording an interview with Heinrich Boere using a hidden camera when he was in a nursing home in 2009.

Jelle Visser, one of the journalists, told AFP after the verdict that they were very happy with the outcome, adding: "That's freedom of the press." We thought it was a much bigger story that Heinrich Boere lived quietly for 60 years after killing people than what we did, [which was] to film him with a hidden camera," he said.

Boere began a life sentence in December for shooting dead three civilians in the Netherlands in 1944 during the Nazi occupation. He confessed to shooting in cold blood pharmacist Fritz Bicknese, bicycle shop owner Teunis de Groot and Frans-Willem Kusters. But he argued that as a member of an SS commando unit tasked with killing suspected resistance members or supporters, he risked being sent to a concentration camp if he refused.

(as/mw)

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