MUNICH
The second hearing of a neo-Nazi terrorist group accused of racially-motivated murders in Germany began Tuesday with legal wrangling at a court in Munich.
Lawyers of Beate Zschaepe, the main suspect who is charged with killing ten people, including eight Turks, between 2000 and 2007, demanded that the hearings be moved to a larger courtroom in the high-profile proceedings. The judges rejected the request.
The prosecution read only a 35-page shortened version of the indictment instead of an original 488-page one.
Zschaepe was busy with her notebook at the beginning of the reading of the indictment that charges her of complicity in all the murders and with being part of a terrorist organization.
The "National Socialist Underground" (or NSU) trial, the highest-profile criminal case in Germany in the past decades, also brings into question modus operandi of Germany's domestic intelligence agencies, fueling doubts that German authorities had been "reluctant" to clamp down on the NSU when it staged its first attack, a bombing in 1998 in the city of Jena.
A string of revelations about the NSU and its ties since November 2011, when the cell's existence first came to light after Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Bonhardt -- two of the three known members of the NSU who allegedly killed themselves following a failed bank robbery -- have sent shock waves through German politics, security bureaucracy and the Turkish community, and expectations have been raised that the trial will shed light on suspicions involving German state institutions.
