This May 7 file picture shows journalists taking pictures of Zschaepe, prior to the start of her trial at a Munich courthouse.
DPA/Munich
Two killers wrestled a Turkish food vendor to the ground in his shop and then shot him dead, a police officer said yesterday at Germany’s trial of a neo-Nazi cell accused of a decade-long wave of anti-foreigner killings.
Beate Zschaepe, 38, is on trial as an accomplice to 10 murders by two men who died in a 2011 apparent murder-cum-suicide. Four other men are alleged to have helped the secretive far-right trio, known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU), that struck from 2000 to 2007.
Germany cannot posthumously charge the two alleged killers, Uwe Boehnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, but is seeking closure through Zschaepe’s trial.
Police failed to solve the murders of the eight Turks, a Greek man and a policewoman, and missed signs they had a racist motive.
A detective described how the attackers killed Mehmet Turgut, 25, in 2004 inside a tiny stand where he grilled doner kebab snacks for sale on a housing estate in the northern port city of Rostock.
The witness told the state superior court in Munich the mode of the killing suggested the attackers knew the area well.
“I come from Rostock, but I had never been there before. It’s really out of the way,” he said. “We were asking ourselves: ‘What would anyone be looking for in a place like that?’”
Turgut seemed to have been first forced to the floor, then shot in the back of the head, investigators concluded. “Whoever went in there didn’t want to steal anything or smash it up, but simply kill.”
It remains unclear if Zschaepe, who kept house for the trio, was present during the grisly series of killings, which appear to have been elaborately planned with the aim of frightening foreigners.
Police have not produced any documentary or forensic evidence that Zschaepe was present for any killings.
