Austria's far-right strongman Joerg Haider has been questioned by detectives over a growing political spying scandal, he said Tuesday.
Haider and a number of supporters of his Freedom Party are suspected of having illegally procured confidential information on their political rivals via a police computer database.
According to Haider, investigators quizzed him with documents found at the home of his former bodyguard, Horst Binder, who was suspended from his job as a policeman Monday.
Police also raided on Monday the home of the former Freedom Party secretary general Gerald Mikscha as well as the house of Mikscha's mother.
"This is intolerable and has nothing to do with a country run according to law," he told reporters in Klagenfurt, capital of the southern province of Carinthia where he is governor.
Austrian prosecutors launched an investigation last week into Haider and several senior Freedom Party members, including the head of the movement's Vienna branch, Hilmar Kabas.
On Monday, 11 policemen believed to have links with the Freedom Party were suspended from their posts, after allegations that they procured classified documents on Haider's political rivals for him.
The scandal broke at the start of October with the publication of a book by a former policeman, Josef Kleindienst, former head of a Freedom Party-affiliated labor union.
In the book Kleindienst said that far-right officials had paid police who belonged to or were close to the Freedom Party in return for information on political foes from police computer files -- VIENNA (AFP)
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