‘Neo-nazi police cell’ threatened toddler

PROSECUTORS are investigating police officers in Frankfurt on suspicion of organising a neo-nazi cell, after they allegedly accessed confidential data on a prominent Turkish-german lawyer and used it to threaten to murder her young child.

Five officers have been suspended from duty as prosecutors continue their inquiry into allegations that they incited racial hatred and shared illegal Nazi imagery.

The investigation was started after Seda Basayyildiz, a solicitor known for representing victims of neonazi violence, reported a death threat against her twoyear-old daughter, the Frankfurter Neue Presse newspaper reported.

Ms Basay-yildiz received a fax in August in which a group calling themselves “NSU 2.0” threatened to murder her child.

The name refers to the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a trio of neo-nazis who murdered Turkish immigrants before being caught a decade ago. The fax named Ms Basay-yildiz’s daughter and stated their full home address.

Ms Basay-yildiz told the newspaper she is used to receiving death threats from far-right extremists and normally ignores them but “this time it went too far”.

“I couldn’t figure out where the author of the letter got this information from. That’s why I turned to the police,” she said.

A police investigation revealed that Ms Basay-yildiz’s private information had been accessed from a computer inside the Frankfurt police department.

Further examination led prosecutors to seize hard drives and mobile phones from five officers. Analysis showed that the officers regularly exchanged images of Hitler and other Nazi imagery via a Whatsapp group.

Last month, police in the central German state of Hesse seized weapons and portraits of Hitler from a restaurant that is believed to be a key meeting point for local neo-nazis.