Germany: Lawyer pursing neo-Nazis got death threats

BERLIN

One of the lawyers working to hold the German neo-Nazi group NSU responsible for a string of murders has received several death threats, local media reported on Monday.

Hessische Rundfunk reported that Turkish-German lawyer Seda Basay Yildiz most recently got a fax with a death threat just three days after the murder of German politician Walter Lubcke.

Lubcke, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the city of Kassel, was murdered by a single gunshot wound to the head in his garden this June.

Lubcke was known for supporting Merkel’s open-door policy for refugees.

"We killed Walter Lubcke. Now it’s your turn," the fax sent to Yildiz reportedly said, signed by “NSU 2.0” and “Prinz Eugen Ssostubaf.”

The “Prinz Eugen Ssostubaf” moniker is thought to be related to a Nazi military unit responsible for massacres in then-Yugoslavia.

From 2000 to 2007, the neo-Nazi terror group National Socialist Underground (NSU) killed eight Turkish immigrants, a Greek citizen, and a German police officer, though the murders long remained unsolved.

Despite 2018 convictions over the murders, families of the victims expressed disappointment and said the trial had left many key questions unanswered.

In December, five police officers in Frankfurt were suspended on suspicion they took Yildiz’s personal information from official records and shared them with far-right extremists.

* Writing by Fatih Hafiz Mehmet in Ankara