German authorities cancel event to remember NSU victims

By Ayhan Simsek

BERLIN (AA) - Germany’s Turkish community slammed local authorities of Kassel city on Tuesday over their controversial decision to cancel an event scheduled to commemorate the victims of a far-right terrorist organization.

The neo-Nazi group, National Socialist Underground, killed Turkish immigrant Halit Yozgat in the Internet cafe that he ran in Kassel, a city in central Germany, on April 6, 2006.

The major event planned for this week by the Turkish community organizations to commemorate Yozgat and eight other victims of the NSU was canceled by the city’s municipality, citing security concerns.

Atila Karaborklu, co-chair of the Turkish Community in Germany (TGD), has sharply criticized Kassel’s municipality for its decision.

“Their message is clear: We couldn’t protect you at that time, and we cannot protect you now. That’s the message of authorities to the families of victims,” he said.

The NSU killed eight Turkish immigrants, a Greek worker and a German policewoman on a deadly seven-year killing spree between 2000 and 2007 -- but the murders remained unresolved until 2011.

When the 21-year-old Halit Yozgat was killed in his Internet-cafe in Kassel in 2006, a domestic intelligence officer, Andreas Temme, was at the Internet cafe, but the spy claimed that he did not see the murder and did not hear anything.

The German public learned about the existence of a far-right terror group named NSU as late as November 2011, when two members of the group reportedly died in a murder-suicide following an unsuccessful bank robbery.

Until 2011, German police and intelligence services dismissed any racial motive for the murders and instead treated immigrant families as suspects with alleged connections to mafia groups and drug traffickers.

However, recent revelations have shown that German domestic intelligence agency BfV had dozens of informants who had contacts with the NSU suspects since the late 90s.

But officials insisted that they had no prior information about the NSU terror cell and its role in the killings.

Many questions related to the NSU’s murders were still unresolved, as dozens of secret files of the domestic intelligence had been destroyed, soon after the death of two leading members of the group in 2011.