25 July 2017•Update: 26 July 2017
By Ayhan Simsek
BERLIN
German prosecutors on Tuesday told a murder trial that a 42-year-old female suspect charged with complicity in 10 killings was part of a violent clandestine neo-Nazi cell.
Closing statements in the high-profile trial of 42-year-old Beate Zschaepe started in Munich’s Higher Regional Court on Tuesday after four years of evidence.
Federal prosecutor Herbert Diemer said testimonies and evidence presented to the court had shown that Zschaepe was a co-founder of the terrorist National Socialist Underground (NSU) group and was an accomplice in murders and bomb attacks between 2000 and 2007.
Tuesday’s hearing was the 375th court session since the trial began in 2013.
NSU members were accused of killing eight Turkish immigrants, a Greek citizen and a German policewoman in a seven-year murder spree.
The shadowy group was only revealed in 2011 when two members died after an unsuccessful bank robbery and police found guns and propaganda in their apartment.
Zschaepe has so far denied any role in the killings and tried to lay the blame on her boyfriends in the far-right terror cell.
Four other suspects are accused of providing support to the extremist group.
A verdict is not expected before the end of this year as lawyers for the accused are expected give their closing arguments in September.
The NSU is believed to have been founded by three right-wing extremists -- Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Bohnhardt and Zschaepe -- who lived underground from 1998 with fake identities.
Since the late 1990s, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, or BfV, recruited various informants from the right-wing scene who were believed to have had contacts with the trio.
But the agency failed to prevent the murders or arrest the suspects.
Until 2011, German police and intelligence services dismissed any racial motive for the murders and instead treated immigrant families as suspects with alleged connections to mafia groups and drug traffickers.
