Lawyer in terror case accuses German police of bias

By Cuneyt Karadag

BERLIN (AA) - A lawyer in a case against far-right terrorist group the National Socialist Underground (NSU) on Tuesday accused German police of targeting the victim's family instead of focusing on the real perpetrators.

During the hearing, Seda Basay, the lawyer for NSU victim Enver Simsek's family, said the police did not take into account the possibility of a xenophobic attack for many years or witnesses' statements.

Basay said the police monitored the phone calls of Simsek's family for around a year and searched their home.

She added that although it was revealed that Enver Simsek was killed by an NSU cell, the family learned this information from the media rather than from the police.

Enver Simsek, who was found lying on a roadside in Nuremberg with several bullets in his body on Sept. 9, 2000, was the first victim of the NSU. Altogether, 10 people were murdered by the far-right terror cell, most of which were from immigrant communities.

Between 2000 and 2007, the neo-Nazi group killed eight Turkish immigrants, a Greek citizen and a German policewoman and carried out bombings and robberies in 12 different German cities.

Recent investigations have revealed severe failures of intelligence and the failure of police units in the eastern state of Thuringia to disrupt the group.

The NSU is believed to have been founded by three far-right extremists -- Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Bohnhardt and Beate Zschaepe -- who lived in Thuringia in the early 1990s.

The German public first learned about the existence of the NSU on Nov. 4, 2011, when two members of the group -- Mundlos and Bohnhardt -- reportedly died in a murder-suicide following an unsuccessful bank robbery.

Until 2011, Germany’s police and intelligence service ruled out any far-right motive for the murders and instead treated immigrant families as suspects.

Zschaepe is currently standing trial for her alleged role in the murders. So far, she has denied any role and tried to lay the blame on her two male accomplices.

Recent revelations have shown that German domestic intelligence agency BfV and its local branches had dozens of informants who had contacts with NSU suspects in the past.

But officials have insisted that they had no prior information about the existence of the NSU and its role behind the killings.