Status: 02/16/2022 04:55 a.m
He is said to have written hundreds of threatening emails under the pseudonym “NSU 2.0”. How he got sensitive police data is still controversial. Now the process in Frankfurt begins.
According to the indictment, Alexander M. is said to be the sole perpetrator. He is considered highly intelligent, is said to be a messie, lived alone and without many social contacts until his arrest in the Berlin neighborhood of Gesundbrunnen, a part of Berlin Mitte. He is the son of a former Waffen SS member, which may play a role in the process. And he is a chess player, which was his undoing.
According to the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office, the unemployed Alexander M. is the author of an unprecedented series of threatening letters, which became known at the end of 2019 under the keyword “NSU 2.0”. The trained EDP specialist is therefore facing the district court in Frankfurt from today. He is said to have sent his first threatening letter to the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Başay-Yildiz on August 2, 2018. She appeared in the first NSU trial as a representative of a victim’s family. She was also known for having managed to get Bin Laden’s alleged ex-bodyguard, Sami A., back from Tunisia. He had been illegally deported.
More than 100 hate letters
In the first threatening letter to the NSU victims’ lawyer, her daughter, who was still very young at the time, was threatened with the “slaughter”. According to the indictment, it is the start of the so-called NSU 2.0 series of threats. The last email was from March 21, 2021. In between, more than 100 hate letters were sent.
Most of women: politicians, lawyers, media professionals. But also the satirist Jan Böhmermann and Hesse’s Prime Minister Volker Bouffier are among the addressees. Böhmermann is therefore also one of the witnesses who are to be questioned before the Frankfurt district court. Alexander M. is accused of 85 acts in the 120-page indictment, including 67 extreme insults.
Where did the police data come from?
In the racist, sometimes vulgar and very violent emails and faxes, Alexander M. is said to have used the greetings “Heil Hitler” and “SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer”. He threatened the addressees, gave private data that cannot be found on the Internet – such as blocked addresses or dates of birth of family members. Some of this data had been retrieved from police computers in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. The public prosecutor suspects that Alexander M. posed as a police officer and asked the alleged colleagues for help.
But there is no evidence of this. The thesis is a mere assertion by the investigators, Başay-Yıldız told the “taz”. In the suspect’s apartment, investigators found books about psychological and rhetorical tricks that can be used to deceive and manipulate people.
Right wing police chat groups
In the course of the investigation, officials came across a right-wing chat group in Frankfurt’s first police station very early on. It also turned out that the data of the Frankfurt lawyer Başay-Yildiz had been retrieved from a police officer’s computer. What followed were house searches at his own colleagues and the Hessian police scandal, in which more and more right-wing chat groups were exposed.
According to the Hessian Ministry of the Interior, one of the six officials in Frankfurt’s first infirmary applied for his release very early on. The other five are released from duty, but only in one case because of the NSU 2.0 allegations. Their disciplinary proceedings are suspended until the final conclusion of the criminal proceedings. The spokeswoman for the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office reports that proceedings against a policewoman and an officer from the 1st district are still open. It would now be awaited whether the trial against Alexander M. would bring new insights.
The 54-year-old himself denies all allegations. He is expected to make a statement on the second day of the hearing. His defense attorneys declined to comment before the trial begins.
Determination by language assessment
For a long time it looked as if the NSU 2.0 series would not be enlightened. Also because the author of the hate mail used the encrypted Tor browser. But eventually the investigators came across comments on the hate platform “Politically Incorrect” (PI-News), the style of which was similar to the hate mail.
Language experts analyzed them, as did profiles on a chess portal in a similar language – because a police officer remembered having encountered the author’s pseudonym there before. The investigators also noticed that the threatening letters had always been sent during breaks in the chess game. In the spring of last year, they finally managed to find out the IP addresses and cell phone numbers from the chess site. They led to Alexander M.
When he was arrested in May, he was sitting at the computer. The special task force came late in the evening because Alexander M. was always on the computer at that time – the suspect’s PC should still be running.
Co-plaintiffs doubt the lone perpetrator thesis
At the end of last year, the public prosecutor’s office accused Alexander M. He will probably comment on the second day of the hearing. A psychiatric expert is also present in the process.
The Frankfurt lawyer Başay-Yildiz and the member of the Bundestag for the left, Martina Renner, are joint plaintiffs. She and four other addressees of the hate messages do not believe that the complex has been cleared up, nor that Alexander M. is a lone perpetrator. Rather, they believe in a targeted transfer of data from police circles. Başay-Yildiz told the “taz” that there were 17 queries about her data in three police databases.
Alexander M. has two defense attorneys who are considered very calm and objective. They emphasize that they would not defend politically, but according to the Code of Criminal Procedure.