They are said to have shared Nazi pictures and insulted minorities in a chat group: Now the public prosecutor’s office has filed charges against five police officers from the 1st district in Frankfurt. The case is related to the right-wing extremist “NSU 2.0” threatening letter.
Because they are said to have shared racist and inciting content in an internal chat group, the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office has brought charges against four police officers from the 1st Frankfurt police station. They are charged with using signs of unconstitutional organizations, hate speech, depicting violence, insulting religious or ideological beliefs and property, and distributing pornographic writings. The partner of an officer is also charged.
The officials – four police commissioners and one police commissioner – are currently released from their official business, the public prosecutor announced on Monday.
Hitler pictures and pornography
According to the investigation, the accused police officers had been members of a chat group since 2014, which was primarily used to share right-wing extremist, racist, anti-Semitic and inhuman images and videos. In addition, they are said to have been active in other chat groups in different constellations.
According to the prosecution, in a total of 102 cases by October 2018, they were said to have posted “mainly content depicting Adolf Hitler, swastikas and other National Socialist symbols as well as downplaying the Holocaust”. Minorities, especially people with disabilities, a migration background, dark skin color, homosexuals, Jews and Muslims were despised and slandered.
In addition, pornographic content is said to have been posted and shared. The public prosecutor assumes that the accused were aware that the content was also made available to third parties outside of the chat groups.
Connection to “NSU 2.0”
The chat group, in which the officers of the 1st police station in downtown Frankfurt were active, plays a crucial role in the investigation into the series of threatening letters from the so-called “NSU 2.0”. In August 2018, investigations were launched against unknown persons after the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz received a fax that contained insults and threats as well as private information about her and her family. Investigations revealed that shortly before the threatening fax was sent, her resident registration data had been queried by a service computer from the 1st district.
A police superintendent who was logged on to the service computer at the time of the query has now also been charged. Moving on, investigators eventually stumbled upon the right-wing police chat group. Since then, a whole series of police chats with right-wing extremist content have become public in Hesse – most recently at the end of last week in the police headquarters in southern Hesse.
process since mid-February
Since mid-February, a 54-year-old unemployed IT technician from Berlin has had to answer to the Frankfurt district court for the series of threatening letters from “NSU 2.0”. The man denies the crime and sees himself as a “scapegoat” in the Hessian police scandal. The lawyers for co-plaintiff Seda Basay-Yildiz also support the thesis that at least the first letter in the series was written by a police officer from the 1st police station.
End of further information