Tag: nsu

Germany promises Turkey thorough probe into murders

German parliamentarians inquiring into a neo-Nazi murder series in Germany have invited senior Turkish officials to monitor a major trial opening in Munich in April. Eight of those murdered were of Turkish origin.

A visit to Turkey by the German parliament’s committee of inquiry into ten neo-Nazi murders between 2000 and 2007 has ended also with a pledge by the committee’s chairman Sebastian Edathy that its findings will be published in Turkish as well. And, he said he would ask Munich judges to allow seats to be reserved for top Turkish observers.

On April 17, Munich’s Higher Regional Court is scheduled to begin the trial of Beate Zschäpe and four other suspects on charges including complicity in anti-foreigner murders. It is likely be one of the largest trials in post-war Germany, with 600 witnesses due to testify.

Germany reassures Turkey

The 38-year-old Zschäpe is the sole surviving member of a core neo-Nazi trio that across Germany allegedly murdered nine shop proprietors, including a resident of Greek origin, and subsequently a policewoman.

Gangland killings were initially blamed but only last year did German police and diverse intelligence agencies admit that they had failed to link the far-right suspects to the murder series. Those failings drew sharp criticism from Turkey, which said trust among millions of residents of Turkish origin in Germany had been shaken. Four senior German security officials also resigned.

The renewed scrutiny of the murder series had followed the discovery in November 2011 of two other dead members of the self-styled National Socialist Underground (NSU) after their apparent murder-suicide in the eastern German city of Zwickau. The trio had lived hidden since 1998.

Observer seats reserved for Turkey

Winding up his committee’s trip in Ankara on Friday, Edathy (pictured above) said he would asked the Munich court to reserve seats at the trial opening for Turkey’s ambassador and the head of the Turkish parliament’s human rights committee, Ayhan Sefer Üstün.

DW.DE

German politician ‘sorry’ for missing right-wing evidence

A German ex-politician has apologized for a botched inquiry following a 2004 terrorist attack in Cologne. The investigative committee said the mistake led police away from discovering a right-wing terror organization. (22.11.2012)

Dresden protesters block neo-Nazis

The Turkish committee’s members had also been invited to attend a Berlin hearing of witnesses before his inquiry panel in April, said Edathy who is an interior affairs expert of Germany’s opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Edathy said Turkish cabinet ministers, including Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin, had been assured by visiting German inquiry members – across all political party lines – that there was no evidence of a cover-up by German authorities in the wake of the NSU murder spree.

The initial supposition by German authorities that organized crime lay behind the murders was “not professional and not objective,” Edathy added.

Turkey calls for improvements

On Thursday, Turkey’s deputy premier, Bekir Bozdag, who oversees the situation of Turks living abroad, said he hoped the German committee’s findings would include suggestions on investigative improvements and not just clarify the murder series.

Alongside Zschäpe, four other men have been charged with various crimes for allegedly helping the NSU, including Ralf Wohlleben, a formerly prominent far-right party functionary, who is accused of organizing weapons for the trio.

The prosecution case has been complicated by suggestions that some of the four might have been informers for Germany’s security services at the time of the alleged NSU crimes.

Next Monday, German President Joachim Gauck is due to meet in Berlin with relatives of the murder victims.

Steffen Seibert, the main spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met relatives early last year, said Merkel would meet them again in May.

ipj/kms (epd, AFP, dpa, Reuters)

via Germany promises Turkey thorough probe into murders | News | DW.DE | 15.02.2013.

February 16, 2013
Turkey says Nazi mentality more dangerous than terrorists

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has said the Nazi mentality, and the idea that Turks in Germany are part of a barbaric nation, is more dangerous than the words he recently used when he paid a five-day visit to Germany at the beginning of December, calling German neo-Nazis “racist terrorists.”

Davutoğlu’s statement is part of a series of remarks Turkish officials have made to call attention to neo-Nazi killings of Turks in Germany in the past decade. Turkey vociferously demanded German officials investigate the racially motivated murders of Turkish Germans.

Germany pledged a quick and comprehensive investigation to discover how a group of neo-Nazis managed to operate under the authorities’ radar for years, allegedly killing 10 people and robbing a string of banks.

The group called itself the National Socialist Underground — a clear reference to the name of the Nazis, the “National Socialists.” The group is suspected of murdering eight people of Turkish origin, one with Greek roots and one policewoman.

The investigation into the group’s activities has spiraled into a national inquiry of previously unsolved crimes, including attacks in Cologne and Duesseldorf between 2000 to 2004, which are now linked to the National Socialist Underground. Those attacks injured more than 30 people, most of foreign origin.

Two people have been arrested: a suspected co-founder of the group — 36-year-old Beate Zschaepe — and an alleged supporter, identified only as 37-year-old Holger G. Two other suspected founding members, Uwe Boehnhardt, 34, and Uwe Mundlos, 38, died in an apparent suicide. Authorities believe the group might have relied on a larger network of “helpers” across the nation. Boehnhardt and Mundlos are suspected of killing themselves in their mobile home after police closed in on them after a bank robbery in the central city of Eisenach.

In the vehicle, police found the service weapons of two police officers who are believed to have been attacked by the group in 2007. A 22-year-old police woman was fatally shot in the head during the attack and her fellow officer was seriously injured.

Other evidence has been recovered from the house believed to have been torched Nov. 4 by Zschaepe, the same day the bodies of Boehnhardt and Mundlos were found. She turned herself in to authorities last week, but has refused to make any statement.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is tasked with tracking extremists, but each state has its own branch and its own police forces, which critics say has resulted in a lack of coordination that has helped the neo-Nazis remain undetected since 1998.

Davutoğlu, in an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, said prejudice against foreigners is more dangerous than any racist terrorist. He added that it is possible to fight a terrorist or terrorist network. “It is more difficult to counter prejudice,” Davutoğlu told the German magazine. Davutoğlu said the Germans should work towards compromise and integration as much as Turks have, and the murders were against the values and goals of Germany and all of Europe. The Turkish foreign minister added that he had seen a serious economic crisis and increasing unemployment during his visits to Europe and that Europeans usually hold immigrants responsible for financial problems, leading to xenophobia. “I do not want to dramatize the incident, but I am really concerned. Politics should be prepared for such a situation,” he said.

via Turkey says Nazi mentality more dangerous than terrorists.

December 13, 2011
Germany, Turkey vow united stand after racist killings

AFP: Germany, Turkey vow united stand after racist killings

03 December 2011 | 23:44 | FOCUS News Agency

Bonn. Germany Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle and his Turkish counterpart Ahmed Davutoglu on Saturday called for action against the far right after a series of racist murders in Germany, AFP reports.

Turks are the largest ethnic group of non-German origin in the country and all the victims were of Turkish origin.

“Right-wing extremism and racism have no place in Germany,” Westerwelle told reporters in Bonn with Davutoglu who has been visiting Germany since Thursday and has met the families of some victims.

“Relations between Turkey and Germany are good. I hope that these horrible murders are not going to divide Turkey and Germany. It’s for this reason that it is of the greatest importance that this series of murders are cleared up,” said Westerwelle.

Davutoglu said the two countries shared a commitment to bringing the perpetrators to justice and stamping out racism.

“It is important that we fight the far right together, that we make a common front against the violence…. We must drain the swamp… these attacks are not going to damage the Germany-Turkey friendship,” added Davutoglu.

Earlier this week, German authorities called for help from the public as they investigated a neo-Nazi cell believed to have murdered 10 people, mainly foreign shopkeepers, in a case that has shocked the country.

Authorities arrested a man on November 24 who stands accused of making a chilling video in 2007 — discovered only last month — in which the militants claimed responsibility for the murders.

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via AFP: Germany, Turkey vow united stand after racist killings – FOCUS Information Agency.

December 5, 2011
Turkish FM criticizes German minister for using ‘Islamist terrorist’

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who is currently in Germany on a five-day visit, has criticized German Federal Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich for using the term “Islamist terrorists” during a meeting on Friday evening, when the German minister said his government is fighting against every kind of terrorist, including racists and Islamist terrorists.

Davutoğlu interrupted the minister’s speech when he mentioned “Islamist terrorists,” and said: “One minute, I have never used the term ‘Christian terrorist’ even though the neo-Nazi killers [who are accused of killing eight Turks and one Greek] are Christians. You can’t say ‘Islamist terrorist.’ Have we been using ‘German racists,’ following the incidents [murders of immigrants]?” and added that he can define the murders as racist killings and acts by a neo-Nazi organization, but does not call the killers Christian terrorists.

When the German minister said they could use the phrase Islamic terrorism to refer to groups such as al-Qaeda, Davutoğlu responded, “Yes, we can call al-Qaeda or the Baader-Meinhof gang terrorist organizations, but we can’t use the terms, Islamist or Christian terrorists.”

Before meeting with Friedrich on Friday in Berlin, Davutoğlu met with the families of some of the Turkish citizens who were killed by a neo-Nazi crime gang, and during his meeting with the interior minister, Davutoğlu reiterated Turkey’s support of the victims’ families.

Friedrich said the interior ministers of Germany’s states will gather to assess the security system in Germany and implied that changes would be made to the procedure of detecting crime in the German police force. “We are also closely watching the case and investigating it from different angles. We have many clues on the murders and we will reopen the cases of unresolved murders in the 1990s,” said Friedrich, and underlined that the police had recovered significant evidence in the burnt-out mobile home, in which two members of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) — the organization that carried out the murders of eight Turks and a Greek national between 2000 and 2007– were found dead and a third handed herself in to police.

Police at the beginning of November discovered that a group of neo-Nazis were responsible for the killing of the eight Turks and a Greek national, when 36-year-old Beate Zschäpe, who is suspected of founding and belonging to the NSU with two other men, Uwe Bohnhardt (34) and Uwe Mundlos (38), turned herself in to police.

Zschäpe is further alleged to have set fire to a house used by the group in an effort to destroy evidence. Police accidentally uncovered the neo-Nazi cell when they were recovering the bodies of two men who were believed to have committed suicide in the house.

The German minister said some of the documents had not been destroyed in the fire, and added that a team of 420 experts had been formed to investigate the case and work on the documents. “We are deeply sorry for the families of the victims,” said the interior minister.

Davutoğlu stated that the statements of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff were very positive and give hope that the case will be solved. The investigation must be pursued to the end, he noted.

The German police’s attitude toward the families of the victims only worsened their psychological and emotional state during the investigation of the murders, according to the Turkish foreign minister. “It is unacceptable for the victims’ relatives to be accused of committing the murders after losing a relative. An 11-year-old-boy had a DNA test 10 times before being accused of killing his father. Or in another case, one of the women [whose husband was killed] was accused of killing her husband after being told her husband had been unfaithful,” said Davutoğlu, speaking out against the way the murders had been investigated. He criticized the mainstream perception of Turkish immigrants, pointing out the absurdity that there is only one type of Turk who is believed to act in the same way regardless of time and space. The perception of Turks must be changed, he noted.

“Nobody considered neo-Nazis [were behind the murders] and focused on the Turks being the potential perpetrators behind their fathers, brothers and children’s murders. To make matters worse, one police officer told a family that they could do nothing to solve the murders,” Davutoğlu said, adding that the Turkish state will provide every kind of support to the families and will grant scholarships to their children.

Before having separate meetings with President Wulff, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle and Hannelore Kraft, the minister-president of North-Westphalia, Davutoğlu warned Turkish civil society groups based in Germany against racist attacks following the deepening economic crisis in the foreseeable future, which could result in a rise of xenophobia and racism, in an address to these groups at the Berlin Turkish House on Saturday.

Davutoğlu said any racist incident will be recorded by Turkish consulates and promised that when a racist attack against Turks takes place he will tell his German counterpart and other officials. From now on, he said, in the event of an incident, Turkish consulates will go to Turkish immigrants before German officials.

via Turkish FM criticizes German minister for using ‘Islamist terrorist’.

December 5, 2011
After 9 murders, Germany’s Turks want crackdown on neo-Nazis

After 9 murders, Germany’s Turks want crackdown on neo-Nazis

David Crossland

Nov 19, 2011

BERLIN // The leader of Germany’s Turkish community yesterday called on the country to vigorously tackle racism following revelations that nine immigrants were killed by right-wing terrorists.

Kenan Kolat claimed the country’s three million Turks were afraid of more neo-Nazi attacks.

“Many people are afraid that this could happen again,” Mr Kolat, the chairman of the Turkish Community in Germany, said in a television interview. “We want more to be done to combat racism.

“These killings were belittled as being isolated cases. We need to start fighting this properly.”

German authorities have been deeply embarrassed by the discovery last week that a previously unknown neo-Nazi group calling itself the “National Socialist Underground” was behind the murders of eight Turkish immigrants and one Greek man in various cities between 2000 and 2006.

The case has left the impression that the police were blind to the threat of far-right violence and did not investigate the murders properly because they involved immigrants.

The victims all worked in small shops, stalls and kiosks and two of them worked in doner kebab restaurants, which is why the German media described the murders as the “Doner Killings”.

The term has been criticised as having racist overtones.

Two of the three terrorists, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, were found dead on November 4 in a camper van in the city of Eisenach.

They apparently committed suicide as police closed in on them following a bank robbery.

The third member, a woman named Beate Zschäpe, turned herself in to the police.

The murder weapon used in all the killings, a Ceska 7.65 millimetre Browning, was found in an apartment the three had used, along with DVDs in which they claimed responsibility for the nine murders, two bomb attacks in which more than 20 immigrants were injured and the killing of a German policewoman in 2007.

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Relatives of the dead said police had rashly dismissed the possibility of a far-right motive and had instead suspected that the victims were caught up with Turkish criminal gangs.

The name of the task force set up by the German police to investigate the crimes, “Bosphorus”, reveals their mindset, immigrants groups claim.

Gamze K, 22, the daughter of Mehmet K, who was shot dead in his kiosk in Dortmund on April 4, 2006, said police investigating his death speculated that he had gambling debts or was killed by a protection racket. Because of German privacy laws, their last names were not being disclosed.

“We were suddenly under suspicion,” she told Bild, a tabloid newspaper, in an interview published on Tuesday. “The police kept looking for crooked business dealings supposedly done by my father. The police didn’t take seriously our suspicion that it could have been neo-Nazis.”

Kerim S, 24, the son of Enver S, a flower seller who was murdered in 2000, also told Bild that “they said my father had something to do with the mafia and smuggled drugs”. He added: “No one spoke of a far-right motive – but only foreigners were killed.”

Police searching the apartment of the trio also found a list of 88 names of politicians and representatives of Turkish and Muslim organisations that they said could have been identified as targets.

The number 88 could be significant because it is neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler”, H being the eighth letter in the alphabet.

The government, alarmed about the harm to Germany’s international reputation, has called a conference of security chiefs for // TODAY? NOV. 18 ? // Friday to discuss a reform of the regionally fragmented police and intelligence authorities in response to their failure.

It also planned to begin compiling a national register of neo-Nazis, similar to a database it already has on radical Islamists, and has pledged to start pursuing the far right with the same vigour it has devoted to the fight against Islamist terror.

Guido Westerwelle, the foreign minister, said: “This isn’t just terrible for the victims. It isn’t just bad for our country. It is also very bad for the reputation of our country in the world.”

The German president, Christian Wulff, plans to meet the relatives of the victims. There has been talk of a national memorial ceremony in their honour.

“I am ashamed our state wasn’t able to protect the murdered victims and the many injured people from these terrorists,” said Thomas Oppermann, a lawmaker for the opposition Social Democrats. “The murder cases are definitely among the worst and most disgusting crimes we have seen in Germany in the last 60 years.”

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via After 9 murders, Germany’s Turks want crackdown on neo-Nazis – The National.

November 21, 2011
Neo-Nazis behind ‘Doner Killings’ as German security services under fire

Neo-Nazis behind ‘Doner Killings’ as German security services under fire

David Crossland

Nov 16, 2011

BERLIN // German security authorities face accusations they grossly underestimated the threat of far-right violence after the chance discovery that a neo-Nazi group murdered nine immigrants in one of the country’s most mysterious and longest-running killing sprees.

The group of at least three people called itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU), and had prepared a gruesome DVD to send to news organisations and Islamic cultural centres claiming it murdered eight Turks and one Greek man between 2000 and 2006 in different cities.

The victims all worked in shops and stalls. Because two ran doner kebab stalls, the murders became known as the “Doner Killings”. The NSU also said it shot dead a German policewoman in 2007 and planted a nail bomb in Cologne in 2004 that injured 22 people, most of them Turks. Police say the group had also committed 14 bank robberies since 1999.

Until recently, the police had insisted the “Doner Killings” were committed by the Turkish mafia or motivated by nationalist splinter groups in Turkey.

But the link to neo-Nazis was revealed this month when police found the murder weapon, a Czech-made Ceska 7.75 millimetre Browning, in an apartment in the eastern town of Zwickau rented by neo-Nazis – two men and a woman.

The men, Uwe Böhnhardt, 34, and Uwe Mundlos, 38, were found dead in a camper van in the eastern town of Eisenach on November 4 after apparently committing suicide following a botched bank robbery.

A few hours later, the house in Zwickau was apparently set ablaze by their alleged accomplice, Beate Zschäpe, who later turned herself in to police.

The case has embarrassed the security authorities, which have for years treated far-right crimes as isolated incidents committed by thugs and have devoted far more resources to combating the threat of terrorism.

Experts are comparing the scale of the violence committed by the NSU to the campaign of assassinations and kidnappings waged by the left-wing Baader-Meinhof group that terrorised Germany in the 1970s.

One major difference is that the Baader-Meinhof members followed up their attacks with messages of responsibility. The NSU killed in silence. While its members had been on police files as right-wing extremists since the 1990s, the existence of the group was apparently unknown to authorities until two weeks ago, and police appeared to have had no idea that they were behind the killings.

In the burnt-out Zwickau apartment police found four DVDs already packaged and ready to send, containing a chilling 15-minute film using the Pink Panther cartoon figure that in one scene stands next to a placard reading: “Germany Tour – 9th Turk shot dead,”

It also showed photos of victims who had been shot in the face. The DVDs were aimed at publicising the group’s actions for the first time, police said.

The trio’s ability to get away with the murders for so long has triggered calls for a reform of Germany’s regionally fragmented security agencies.

Representatives of Muslim and Jewish groups accused the police of having been blind to the emergence of neo-Nazis bent on violence against minorities.

The chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, said on Monday that German authorities had chronically underestimated right-wing extremism for 20 years.

“Evidently right-wing terrorism was able to expand unhindered because the authorities were too focused on religiously motivated attackers,” Mr Mazyek told Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, a regional newspaper.

Eastern Germany in particular has been dogged by right-wing extremism since the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was an upsurge in violence against immigrants and asylum seekers in the early 1990s as people vented their anger over high unemployment that followed the rapid economic collapse in the former communist region. Analysts have also blamed the rise of neo-Nazism in the east on a lack of education about the Nazi crimes in schools during the communist regime. Attacks on Jewish and immigrant property and racist assaults on ethnic minorities are common there.

Experts on right-wing extremism said the neo-Nazis could have been stopped before they killed.

“No one can say it wasn’t possible to detect the potential of the Thuringia groups in the 1990s,” Bernd Wagner, an analyst of the far-right culture, said. “They should have been taken seriously and tracked down.”

The group went underground in 1998. Ms Zschäpe has been remanded. A suspected helper was arrested on Sunday in the northern town of Kleinau.

The co-leader of the Greens Party, Cem Özdemir, told Welt am Sonntag: “How could the suspects spend years murdering people due to right-wing extremist motives without the police and domestic intelligence service having even the slightest inkling of it?”

The case has led to renewed calls to ban the National Democratic Party, described as the flagship of the far-right. The party is openly xenophobic and anti-Semitic and extols a vision of a Fourth Reich containing only Germans.

Analysts say the far-right has festered in the east due to a lack of political support for anti-racism campaigns and a failure by police to clamp down hard enough on far-right crimes.

“There is a whole landscape of militant groups from which such terrorist groups and networks can emerge,” said Mr Wagner.

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via Full: Neo-Nazis behind ‘Doner Killings’ as German security services under fire – The National.

November 21, 2011