MUNICH
A Munich court on Monday postponed "National Socialist Underground" (NSU) trial to May 14 to assess recusation demand of suspects' lawyers.
Sessions, which had been planned to take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, will not be held either.
As suspects demanded recusation, Munich State High Court postponed the trial to May 14. A senate of judges will decide about recusation demand.
AA correspondent covered today's trial together with Turkish Ambassador in Berlin Huseyin Avni Karslioglu and members of Turkish Parliamentary Human Rights Committee.
A year and a half after German security authorities became aware about the existence of NSU, the court began to hear the case on Monday against a chief suspect plus four others on the charges of killing 10 people, including 8 Turks, a Greek national and a German policewoman, between 2000 and 2007, 14 bank robberies, arson and aiding a terrorist group.
Leading suspect Beate Zschaepe is accused of collaborating in murders, being a member of a terrorist organization and incension.
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.
