29 September 2016•Update: 29 September 2016
BERLIN
The chief suspect in an eight-year string of murders mainly targeting Turkish immigrants made an oral statement on Thursday, breaking over three years of silence in a high-profile trial.
Beate Zschaepe, who is accused of involvement in 10 murders committed by Germany’s National Socialist Underground (NSU) between 2000 and 2007, denied any role in the killings.
The 41-year-old accused neo-Nazi tried to lay the blame on her two colleagues in the far-right terror cell.
“I denounce what Uwe Bohnhardt and Uwe Mundlos did to the victims, and my own misbehavior,” she told the court, in her first oral statement since the trial started in May 2013.
Zschaepe said when she first met Bohnhardt in the 1990s she had neo-Nazi sympathies, but claimed that her views changed over time.
“Today I know that violence cannot be a tool for achieving goals,” she said.
In her short statement, Zschaepe offered no new evidence about the murders or the links of the shadowy NSU.
Zschaepe is the only surviving member of the NSU, as Bohnhardt and Mundlos were found dead in 2011 after an unsuccessful bank robbery.
Zschaepe surrendered to police a few days afterwards, but not before she set fire to the apartment in Zwickau, eastern Germany she had shared with the two men.
Until last December, Zschaepe had exercised her right to remain silent. But nearly 10 months ago, she let her lawyer read out written testimony to the court and later also agreed to take written questions.
The neo-Nazi NSU cell killed eight Turks, one Greek immigrant, and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007, all apparently without arousing the suspicions of the German police or the intelligence services.
Until 2011, Germany's 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.
But the far-right links to the killings were exposed in November 2011, after propaganda, guns, and weapons were found in the wreckage of the burned apartment.
Some recent revelations have suggested ties between far-right extremists and informants for the domestic intelligence agency.
German authorities have denied any such relationships between its agents and the NSU murders.
