Frankfurt | German justice announced Tuesday the arrest of a suspect following a campaign of threat letters in the country against personalities or migrants signed by a small neo-Nazi group responsible for a dozen assassinations.
The 53-year-old, unemployed, has already been convicted in the past for crimes attributed to the far-right movement, said the public prosecutor of Frankfurt am Main.
The suspect is “strongly suspected” of having sent since August 2018 throughout the country a series of “threat letters with content inciting hatred, insulting and threatening, under the pseudonym NSU 2.0”, said the prosecution.
A reference to the neo-Nazi NSU group responsible for a dozen assassinations in the 2000s, mainly of migrants.
These letters, more than a hundred in total, were mainly addressed to public figures known for their commitment against racism and anti-Semitism, in favor of migrants, as well as to immigrants themselves.
Investigators have long suspected they were dealing with a police officer, which is not the case, as the author of the letters had access to the addresses and contact details of the recipients.
According to German media, the man obtained them both on the “darknet”, where they were illegally available, as well as by contacting various administrations and bypassing their suspicion.
During March, the Minister of the Interior of the region of Hesse, Peter Beuth, had indicated that a total of 133 threatening letters had been sent, of which 115 attributed by the investigators to “NSU 2.0”, the rest coming from counterfeiters. .
The murder in June 2019 by a neo-Nazi activist of Walter Lübcke, elected from the conservative party which defended Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming migrants, has awakened the specter of “brown” terrorism in the country.
Underestimated in the 2000s, the threat is seen today as a crucial challenge for internal security.