Cold cases involving murdered immigrants in Germany will be reopened, the German Interior Ministry said yesterday, after the president suggested there may be more victims of a recently revealed neo-Nazi cell.
The Interior Ministry said it would investigate potentially related crimes and attacks dating back to 1998.
Members of the terror organization National Socialist Underground, Beate Zschape, Uwe Bönhardt and Uwe Mundlos, are being charged with murdering nine Turkish- and one Greek-origin businessmen between 2000 and 2006, said the ministry, adding that the nail-bomb attacks in central Cologne in 2004 and the murder of Police Officer Michele Kiesewetter in 2007 in Heilbronn are also attributed to the trio.
German police are referring to the series of murders, the victims of which include a flower wholesaler, a tailor and kebab stall owners, as the “kebab killings.”
The head of state raised the question of what lessons German authorities must learn from the failure to detect the cell earlier.
“We don’t know yet how many people became victims of these crimes. The question comes up as to whether or not our country has been able to satisfy the victims and their survivors,” German President Christian Wulff said in a speech addressing the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “Did we fail to suspect extremist movement behind it, and were protagonists of extremist circles monitored sufficiently? Were we misled by prejudice? How can we be certain that the state fulfills its obligation to protect all social areas? We must not be speechless against their survivors. We must have an answer,” he added.
“People in our country, just living among us, became victims of hate crimes committed by right-wing extremists,” said Wulff. “I am deeply shocked and share the outrage of people in our country. We commemorate the victims and share the grief of their families.”
Wulff said he would meet with relatives of the victims along with members of the government and the parliament, saying he shared the “outrage of many people in our country.”
Opposition parties in Germany have criticized authorities for failing to prevent violence against immigrants in recent years.
German Green Party co-chairwoman Claudia Roth said it was a scandal that the murders were originally thought to be the result of an intra-community feud and that the murderers were connected to the federal republic’s intelligence service, Anatolia news agency reported yesterday.
“It is a scandal that the victims were thought to be suspects,” she said. “The role of the police and the [intelligence services] should be revealed first.”
President Wulff has already said he would meet with the families of the victims, but Roth called on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to do likewise.
If Germans had been the targets of a radical Islamist group, the authorities would have displayed a much quicker reaction, Sigmar Gabriel, chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), said yesterday, criticizing the lack of an investigation into the deaths of the eight Turks, one Greek and one policewoman.
“All the streets would be closed down; all the top officials would take action immediately [if Islamists had attacked Germans]. But none of this was done [in the present case],” he added.
Gabriel visited Turkish shop owners in Cologne’s Keupstrasse, where it was revealed that the far-right group had detonated a bomb.
Meanwhile, a list of 88 people, including Turkish politicians in Germany, was found in the house used and burned by the neo-Nazi cell, German newspapers reported, according to daily Radikal
