COPENHAGEN, April 18. /ITAR-TASS/. During a private talk with Vladimir Putin, Anders Fogh Rasmussen indeed had a recorder with him, Denmark's Ritzau news agency reports. The meeting of Rasmussen and Putin took place in Brussels in 2002, when Denmark presided in the European Union.

During his annual call-in session with the nation on Thursday, Putin expressed indignation at the fact that current NATO Secretary-General Rasmussen once, when he was Danish prime minister, secretly taped him without permission and published the private talk. “He asked me to meet. The meeting was not planned. I agreed. We met and talked, and as it turned out he had taken a voice recorder with him, secretly taped our talk and later published it in the press,” Putin said. “I could not believe it. Some nonsense,” Putin said.

Rasmussen explained that he had recorded the talk for history. “It was flattering to me, of course. However, he should have informed me in advance or at least ask permission to publish the conversation,” Putin noted.

“What trust may there be after such incidents?” the Russian leader asked.

The NATO secretary-general's special adviser Jonas Torp denied the claim. The accusations were absurd, he stated. During his tenure as prime minister, Rasmussen did not bring a voice recorder with him to tape talks with Putin or anybody else, he said.

Meanwhile, journalist Christopher Guldbrandsen, who then was making a documentary “Fogh behind the Scenes”, told Ritzau Bureau that during a press conference he fastened a microphone on the Danish prime minister's clothes. After the press conference, Rasmussen went for the meeting with the Russian president and did not take the recording device off. The talk was taped and used in the film, Guldbrandsen said.

It happened only because the microphone was fixed during the press conference, he explained, noting that usually Rasmussen checked very attentively whether he had no microphone with him in such occasions.