The first person legally recognized in Germany as a victim of the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster in Ukraine has had that recognition withdrawn by a court in Erfurt.
Klaus Neukirch, who died in July 1999 of cancer, worked in East Germany in 1986 helping clean trucks returning from Ukraine and contaminated with radioactivity.
A court in Nordhausen in 1998 recognized his illness as being due to the work he did.
But the Erfurt court held Wednesday that the level of radiation that he had been exposed to was in fact much lower than previously stated, because of a doctor's calculating error.
Fresh expert evidence showed that he had in fact been exposed to less than one microsievert, according to the presiding judge Guenter Becker.
Neukirch was part of a team of eight men given the task of cleaning some 100 trucks which returned from Ukraine a few days after the Chernobyl disaster. Seven members of the team are now dead -- ERFURT, Germany (AFP)
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