Lawyer to approach European court in NSU murder case

By Emin Ileri

ISTANBUL (AA) – One of the joint attorneys of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) murder case said on Thursday that he will approach the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for justice after losing faith in German courts.

The shadowy NSU killed 8 Turkish immigrants, a Greek citizen and a German police officer, between 2000 and 2007, but the murders had long remained unresolved.

After a five-year-long trial, a Munich court handed a life sentence in July 2018 to the main suspect, Beate Zschaepe, and gave lighter sentences to four other neo-Nazis, but families of the victims expressed disappointment with the verdict and said the trial has left many key questions unanswered.

“I don’t trust German courts. I’m sure we will lose the final verdict. After their final decision we will take the case to the European Court of Human Rights,” Mehmet Daimaguler, the joint attorney said at a conference in Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University.

“I don’t expect much from the penal suits in Germany. That is why we appealed for compensation. We claim that if German courts and police did their job right, this murder would not have happened in the first place, ” he added.

He said he had faith in German Chancellor Angela Merkel but did not trust German intelligence agencies.

The neo-Nazi killing spree by the NSU is “a very dark stain” in Germany’s history, Merkel had said last July, and promised to continue efforts to uncover facts about these murders.

The German public first learned of the NSU’s existence and its role in the murders in 2011, when two members — Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Bohnhardt — died after an unsuccessful bank robbery and police found guns and far-right literature in their apartment.

During the five-year trial, Beate Zschaepe, the only surviving member of the group, declined to give any insight about the NSU and tried to lay the blame on her two deceased colleagues.

Until 2011, Germany’s police and intelligence services ruled out any racial motive for the murders and instead treated immigrant families as suspects, questioning them over alleged connections with mafia groups and drug traffickers.

Daimaguler said: “The lawyers who follow the case are getting death threats. I've received about 1,600 threats so far myself but I don't take them seriously. ”

Turkish-German lawmaker Seda Basay-Yildiz who represented the families of the NSU victims told local media on Monday that she has recently received death threats from neo-Nazis.

Suspected far-right extremists threatened Basay-Yildiz in a fax message signed NSU 2.0. The message also provided details about her family which were not publicly available, Suddeutsche Zeitung reported.

She said it was the second death threat she received since August, when another fax-message threatened with the murder of her 2-year-old daughter.

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