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Relatives of victims lamented the lack of changes by the German police to prevent neo-Nazis from joining their ranks.
Lawyers for victims of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground cell (NSU) criticized the German police on Thursday on the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the terrorist group that killed 10 people.
On the tenth anniversary since the group’s activity came to light, family members and civil society organizations regretted that the police, who failed to arrest the cell, have not introduced substantial changes to curb far-right sympathies in their ranks. .
“Institutional racism is an issue that is still virulent,” said one of the attorneys for the prosecution in the case against the NSU, Mehmet Daimagüler, in an interview on the public channel ARD.
“It cannot be that every week a new neo-Nazi chat group is discovered in the police or the army and that we continue to talk about isolated cases,” said the lawyer, adding that “we do not need Nazis and racists in uniform.”
“Today there are more open questions than ten years ago,” added Daimagüler, referring to the possible involvement of members of the security forces in the cover-up of the NSU activity.
Abdulkerim Şimşek, son of one of the victims, also denounced this Wednesday that, after the murder of his father, the police became suspicious of the family itself, accusing them of ties to the mafia, instead of investigating the extreme right-wing angle.
“It is something that I cannot forgive the police,” said Şimşek at an event organized by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation on the occasion of the anniversary.
Failure of institutions
The NSU acted with impunity for ten years and its activity was not discovered until two members of the group, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, committed suicide after a failed robbery.
The third known member of the cell, Beate Zschäpe, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018, although it cannot be excluded that the group had other accomplices who have remained hidden.
The investigation of the NSU’s activity was plagued with failures and, ten years later, multiple civil society organizations consider that the support that the group received has not been sufficiently clarified, in particular from members of the security forces and members of the public. secret services.
In this sense, the lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz, who after her involvement in the trial has been the target of threats from far-right groups, spoke in statements to Bayern 2 radio of “a great failure of the state and a failure of the institutions “.
Amnesty International (AI) also joined the accusations this week, regretting that the German police had not made improvements after the “longest series of racist murders in the history of the federal republic”.
“The police have not learned enough from the NSU complex (in reference to the name of the terrorist cell) and there is still a great need for the next government to act on it,” the organization said in a statement. (I)
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