FRANKFURT, West Germany -- Two West German leftists released Tuesday from 10-year jail terms in Israel for plotting to shoot down an El Al jet said they were tortured by Israeli interrogators using 'psychedelic drugs.'
Thomas Reuter, 29, and Brigitte Schulz, 28, denied Israeli reports they confessed at a secret trial last September to conspiring to shoot down an Israeli passenger plane in Kenya in 1976.
'We never confessed anything in Israel,' Miss Schulz quickly told reporters before she and Reuter, who arrived from Tel Aviv, were whisked away by relatives and a foreign ministry official.
Reuter told West German officials questioning him on arrival that Israeli secret agents had kidnapped them in Kenya and drugged them before bringing them to Israel, a witness at the questioning said.
Reuter told officials they were held for 14 months in various 'secret interrogation centers' before their trial.
Reuter said he and Miss Schulz were subject to 'medieval torture methods but also super modern interrogation using psychedelic drugs' at the centers.
Miss Schulz said the treatment after the sentence had been 'quite fair toward the end,' adding she had counted on being released early next year.
There are no charges against the pair in West Germany.
The Bonn government welcomed their release, saying it came after repeated pleas by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
The two were sentenced to 10 years in jail last September after a secret trial. Before the trial, both had been held incommunicado for more than a year. Israel acknowledged their arrests in March 1977, following protests from the West German government.
Three Palestinians were captured along with the two West Germans.
Interviewed in jail by UPI in January, Miss Schulz said Israeli security agents blindfolded and drugged her and brought her to Israel from an army base in Kenya. She indicated she thought she would be released in 1981.
Miss Schulz said she believed in 'the struggle of the Third World against the domination of American imperialism of its economy and culture.
'Israel was dependent on the United States and therefore forced to help in its activities,' she said.
Official Israeli sources have never released any information about the attempted sabotage nor named the country where the incident was said to have taken place.
