Museum Cctv Focused on German Chancellor's Sofa Moments

It was supposed to protect some of Germany's most famous antique treasures. But yesterday embarrassed officials admitted that a security camera on the roof of Berlin's Pergamon Museum had instead been filming the chancellor, Angela Merkel.

The camera overlooks Ms Merkel's private flat. Over the past eight years, guards at the museum in Berlin's central Mitte district had been able to spy into Ms Merkel's living room, the newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported yesterday. They could even zoom in on her sofa, it added. When reporters from the paper tried it for themselves they spotted Ms Merkel's reclusive husband, Joachim Sauer, watching television.

"It was like a scene out of the Big Brother container," the paper noted in its front-page story.

Germany's federal police, the BKA, said yesterday that they were investigating how the camera had been able to spy on Ms Merkel "day and night". Museum staff said that the offending camera had now been "adjusted" and could no longer be aimed at her flat.

Unlike her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, Ms Merkel decided not to move into Berlin's giant modernist chancellery building when she became chancellor four months ago. Instead, she and her husband kept their otherwise well-protected flat opposite the museum.

The revelation came as millions of Germans went to the polls yesterday in three states: Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt and Baden-Württemberg. The federal elections are the first big test of public opinion since last year's inconclusive general election, which saw Ms Merkel become chancellor at the head of a right-left coalition.

Ms Merkel's Christian Democrats were last night expected to keep control of the affluent southern state of Baden-Württemberg, while the Social Democrat Kurt Beck was tipped to stay in power in Rhineland-Palatinate. In Saxony-Anhalt, a depressed eastern state, the ruling Christian Democrat-Free Liberal coalition was in trouble, polls suggested. The Social Democrats could replace the liberals in a coalition arrangement mirroring the one in Berlin, observers said.

Ms Merkel will hope that her party does not do too well. Any collapse in the Social Democrat vote could exacerbate tensions within her "grand coalition" government.