DPA/Berlin

 

A public inquiry in Germany concluded yesterday that serious blunders at an anti-terrorism agency enabled a neo-Nazi gang to kill nine immigrants from 2000 to 2007.

In a damning indictment, state parliamentarians found the Thuringia state office for the protection of the constitution, which was supposed to monitor and infiltrate extremists in the state – a hotbed of the far-right in the 1990s – failed to share data about the gang.

The office hired senior figures in the neo-Nazi movement as informers, paid them “exaggerated” monthly fees, but then failed to pass on to the police the intelligence it extracted from them.

Germany was shocked in 2011 when two neo-Nazi men died in a murder-suicide and were revealed to be the gunmen in the nine cold-case killings, most of them of ethnic Turks, as well as in the murder of a police officer.

Immigrant community leaders have voiced incredulity that German intelligence agencies could have overlooked the gang and wondered aloud if the killers might have had high-level official protection.

But the 1,800-page report, issued in the state capital Erfurt, found no evidence for this.

Like an earlier federal-level inquiry, it blamed incompetence and internecine jealousies among the security agencies.

The two men, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, hailed from the state, as did their associate, Beate Zschaepe, who is currently on trial for terrorism and complicity to murder.

Federal data estimates there are 21,700 neo-Nazis in Germany’s 80mn population.

The killings raised fears that Nazi ideas might be making a comeback in Germany, especially among youth in former communist-ruled areas, but federal watchdogs say the movement is gradually shrinking.

The report said the murders could have been prevented if security agencies had not made such grave mistakes.

Dorothea Marx, the chairwoman of inquiry, said that it seemed the state anti-terrorism agency was afraid its informers would be unmasked and it would lose access to information from inside the neo-Nazi movement if it told state police what it knew about the fugitive Boehnhardt.

“It’s a scandal that other agencies put up with this. They had a duty to pass on the data,” she said.

Referring to both the perpetrators and the bumbling surveillance agency, she said: “Heavy guilt rests on Thuringia state.”

Another official, state parliament speaker Birgit Diezel, apologised in the state’s name to the families of the 10 victims.

During a fruitless, decade-long investigation of why mainly Turkish businessmen were repeatedly being found shot dead in their shops, police often suggested protection rackets might be operating among ethnic minorities and meting out death to non-payers.

“We beg your pardon for those suspicions being cast and for the long-term lack of sympathy,” she said.