MOSCOW, October 2 (RIA Novosti), Ekaterina Blinova - The Federal Police Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a German domestic security agency, has come under attack from a parliamentary committee on internal affairs for negligence in investigating the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground's crimes in the eastern German state of Thuringia.
"Over five years before the NSU [National Socialist Underground] members were caught, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution - German domestic intelligence - was in possession of a CD labeled "NSU/NSDAP." The CD had been in the intelligence archive since 2005, but was only found last Monday during an archive search, Deutsche Welle reports.
The CD, found this week, contains "rightwing extremist material" and the NSU tag. However, nine years ago, Germany's security authorities turned a blind eye to this important evidence linking the NSU group to the neo-Nazi movement. The parliamentary committee members have expressed their deep concerns regarding the case, asking whether "there were motives behind the CD not being 'found' all this time," or whether it was just an example of the federal intelligence service lacking professionalism.
"This is yet another setback in a long line of mishaps on the part of our intelligence when it comes to rightwing terrorism," underscores Irene Mihalic, a Green party politician, as cited by Deutsche Welle.
Germany's biggest neo-Nazi trial against the NSU opened in May 2013. Since two of three members of the group, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, committed suicide in November 2011, Beate Zschäpe, the remaining NSU member, was charged with racially motivated murder. The terrorist neo-Nazi group was responsible for killing nine immigrants – eight Turkish and one Greek – and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007. Der Spiegel noted that "the police never seriously considered that the motive may be racism and instead suspected that the victims, who included a flower seller, a grocer and a part-time tailor, themselves had links with criminal gangs."
The large number of mistakes made during the investigation of the serial murder case had become a "huge embarrassment" for Germany's police and security authorities.
According to Deutsche Welle, in August, 2014, a fact-finding parliamentary committee presented a detailed analysis of the police investigation into the NSU's case. The 1,800-page report documented a string of errors made by police, which indirectly enabled the neo-Nazi group to commit its crimes without being held accountable. The report exposed certain deficits of cooperation between the state police authorities and Germany's intelligence agency as well as "a failure to follow up certain paths of inquiry and clues."
"The large number of wrong decisions meant that the security authorities had indirectly aided the spread of right-wing extremist structures in Thuringia," Deutsche Welle emphasizes, citing the report.
It is worth mentioning that the previous report, released by the parliamentary commission in August 2013, had also slammed the police and security authorities, accusing them of "sweeping incompetence and institutional racism."
