German Minister Resigns over MP 'Probe Leak'

A minister of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's new government resigned Friday over claims that he leaked confidential information about an international child porn probe.

Agriculture Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, who was then interior minister, has come under fire for tipping off the party chief of a prominent MP that the lawmaker was under investigation.

"I offered Chancellor Angela Merkel my resignation today from my post as federal agriculture minister," Friedrich said in a hastily called televised statement.

He reiterated earlier remarks that he believed he had "acted politically and legally correctly".

"But I will also say that the pressure on me has grown so much in the last few hours that the duties ... in the agriculture ministry can no longer be handled with the necessary concentration, calm and political support," he said.

Merkel, still on crutches after a Christmas skiing accident, said shortly afterwards in a short televised statement that she had accepted his resignation "with great respect and great regret".

"With this move Hans-Peter Friedrich is proving once again his upstanding demeanor," she said adding that regardless of the legal assessment, he had assumed "political responsibility".

According to Bild daily, Merkel pushed Friedrich, a conservative ally in her two-month-old left-right "grand coalition", to step down after he earlier announced he would do so in the event a legal inquiry was launched.

The case has blown up since news broke early in the week that searches had been carried out at the home and offices of Social Democrat (SPD) lawmaker Sebastian Edathy as part of a child pornography investigation.

Edathy -- who has gained prominence for heading a parliamentary panel into the shock 2011 discovery of a neo-Nazi killer cell -- had stepped down from his Bundestag seat days earlier citing health reasons.

He has vehemently denied in an Internet-posted statement being in possession of child pornography.

Friedrich said in his earlier statement that in passing on the information to SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel, who is now Merkel's economy minister and vice chancellor, he had acted "to the best of my knowledge and conscience".

The move dates back to October, a month after German general elections when Merkel's triumphant conservatives were in the process of building a coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats.

Friedrich, a folksy and conservative politician from the southern state of Bavaria, was moved from the interior ministry to the food, agriculture and consumer protection ministry when Merkel appointed her third cabinet in December.

He had come under fire last year over his meek handling of the U.S. online surveillance scandal revealed by fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, which angered many Germans.

Opposition parties branded as a "disaster" and a "flop" Friedrich's visit to Washington in which he had officially sought answers over the National Security Agency's activities.