German neo-Nazi terrorist gets life sentence
Murders strained relations with Turkey, shamed spy agency
BERLIN — The sole surviving member of one of Germany’s deadliest neo-Nazi terrorist groups was sentenced to life imprisonment Wednesday in the culmination of a saga that has shamed the country’s security services, strained its relationship with Turkey and fueled accusations of institutional racism.
After a trial in Munich that lasted more than five years, the group member, Beate Zschaepe, was convicted of 10 counts of murder, with additional counts of attempted murder, robbery, arson and belonging to a terrorist organization.
But her conviction and sentencing, almost 18 years after the group’s first victim was killed, seems unlikely to bring closure at a time when German politics have become more fractured and the national discourse more anti-immigrant.
Then as now, however, victims and their families said that the criminal inquiries and subsequent trial had not done enough to expose the group’s network of helpers, with the initial investigators far quicker to suspect people from immigrant backgrounds than to realize that they were being targeted by right-wing terrorists.
Four people who helped the group were sentenced alongside Zschaepe, receiving prison terms from 30 months to 10 years.
Between 2000 and 2007, Zschaepe, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt killed a police officer and nine people from Greek or Turkish backgrounds, mostly shooting workers at small businesses.
The court also found they had twice planted bombs in Cologne, a city in western Germany, wounding almost two dozen people, and carried out a series of robberies to finance their terrorist cell, which they called the National Socialist Underground, a reference to the Nazi party’s official name.
Heinz Fromm, the head of the German domestic intelligence, resigned in 2012 over failures in the investigation into the group and the premature shredding of an internal document salient to the case.
In 2013, the president of the German Parliament offered an official apology to the victims’ families.
Gamze Kubasik, the daughter of Mehmet Kubasik, a Turkishborn kiosk owner who was killed by the trio in the western city of Dortmund in 2006, said at a news conference on Tuesday, “The NSU killed my father, but the investigators destroyed his honor.”
Turkey has been involved in the trial since before its beginning, which was delayed by a lawsuit demanding space in court for Turkish reporters.
Eight of the 10 murder victims had Turkish roots, authorities say.