CAT/C/32/D/214/2002 Page 9 claim during his hearing before the Wiesbaden Administrative Court in 1999. It considers the complainant’s explanation that he wanted to keep this participation confidential, as required by the PKK, and because PKK membership was punishable under German law, implausible, because: a) the contradiction between the alleged confidentiality of his training and the fact that the complainant had allegedly been introduced to a wide Kurdish community at the Halim-Dener-Festival; b) the unlikelihood that the complainant would consider an imminent danger of torture the “lesser of two evils” compared to a conviction for PKK membership in Germany; c) the fact that, despite the dismissal of his asylum claim by the Wiesbaden Administrative Court on 7 September 1999, he did not reveal his participation in PKK training on appeal to the Higher Administrative Court of Hessen; and d) the obvious need to supplement his claims for purposes of a new asylum application after the expulsion order of 7 December 2001 had become final and binding. 8.6 The State party submits that, even assuming that the complainant had been introduced as a “guerilla candidate” at the festival in 1994, his subsequent failure to continue the training, let alone to fight in Southeast Turkey, prevented him from occupying a prominent position within PKK. 8.7 While not excluding the possibility that the complainant’s conviction of “joint coercion in road traffic” was communicated to the Turkish authorities under the international exchange of judicial records, the State party submits that the place of the offense could only be deduced indirectly from the information concerning the competent court. Even if his participation in the highway blockade could be revealed on the basis of this information, such low-profile activity was unlikely to trigger any action on the part of the Turkish authorities. 8.8 As to the burden of proof in national proceedings, the State party argues that the German courts’ obligation to investigate the facts of a case only relates to verifiable facts. The Federal Agency and courts complied with this obligation by pointing out inconsistencies in the complainant’s description of events and by providing him with opportunities to clarify these inconsistencies in two hearings before the Federal Agency and one before the Administrative Court of Wiesbaden. Comments by the complainant 9.1 On 27 March and 10 May 2003, the complainant commented on the State party’s merits submission, arguing that the issue before the Committee is not whether his allegations during the first set of asylum proceedings were credible, but whether knowledge by the Turkish authorities of his participation in the PKK training course would subject him to a personal and foreseeable risk of torture upon return to Turkey. 9.2 The complainant justifies inconsistencies between his initial and later submissions to the German authorities with the preliminary character, under the Asylum Procedure Law of 1982 (replaced in 1992), of his first statement before the immigration police. This, according to the police translator, had to be confined to one handwritten page, outlining the reasons for his asylum application. In his agent’s letter of 7 February 1991, as well as his interview of 5 May 1991, the complainant explained in detail that, after his military service, he became a PKK sympathizer and