MUNICH (GERMANY) (AFP) -
A
group of neo-Nazis calling itself the "Old School Society" went on
trial Wednesday in Germany charged with forming a terror group that
planned attacks against an asylum seeker home.
The four suspects
-- three men and a 23-year-old woman identified as Denise Vanessa G. --
were arrested last May, two days before they allegedly planned to strike
at a migrant shelter in the eastern state of Saxony.
Their choice
of weapon was modified "pyrotechnic explosives, particularly in the
form of fire and nail bombs", which they were planning to hurl into a
refugee home, said the prosecutor.
The group had therefore "accepted that people could be killed," chief prosecutor Joern Hauschild told the court.
In
the dock on Wednesday, co-accused Andreas Thomas H., 57, looked on with
a smile, while the heavily tattooed Markus W., 30, glanced around the
room mockingly.
The four suspects, who also included 38-year-old Olaf O., met through the Internet in 2014.
In
preparation for the attacks, they bought large quantities of banned
fireworks from the Czech Republic and subsequently decided to cover the
explosives with a layer of nails to make them more lethal.
Hauschild
described their plan for the Saxony attack as very concrete, adding
that the authorities had learned the details from chat logs and phone
intercepts.
The prosecutor added that the neo-Nazi group had
between 10 and 15 members, with investigations still ongoing against
other suspects.
Group emblems published on media websites feature
Germanic runes popular in the neo-Nazi scene, bloody hatchets and skulls
with the slogan: "One bullet is not enough."
Amateur videos posted on YouTube and attributed to the group also use racist and xenophobic slurs in appeals for new recruits.
- Rise in far-right attacks -
A
record influx of asylum seekers to Germany has fuelled a sharp rise in
the number of far-right attacks, with Saxony state gaining special
notoriety for such violence.
The number of extreme-right crimes,
including assaults against asylum seekers and arson at refugee homes,
tripled to 784 cases last year in Saxony compared to 235 in 2014,
official data showed.
Germany's domestic security agency also
noted that the number of violent far-right activists in the former
communist state has soared to 1,300 in 2015 from 300 the previous year.
Last
week, an elite anti-terror unit also arrested five suspects accused of
belonging to an extremist organisation called the Freital Group, named
after a town in Saxony where the female defendant in the Old School
Society case was born.
Prosecutors say the Freital Group aimed to
"carry out explosives attacks on homes for asylum seekers as well as
the homes of political enemies".
Like the Old School Society, the suspects stockpiled fireworks from the Czech Republic to use in attacks.
The group allegedly carried out at least three attacks.
In
the first, fireworks were used to blow out the windows of the kitchen
of a refugee shelter in Freital in September 2015, while the other
involved hurling fireworks and stones at a building housing leftist
activists.
Prosecutors said that the cell also attacked another
refugee shelter in Freital in November last year, where a resident
suffered cuts to his face from flying glass.
by Ralf Isermann
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