The 37-year-old German was arrested on suspicion of belonging to the right-wing terrorist organization calling itself “National Socialist Underground.” Germany’s Federal Prosecutors’ Office said in a statement they are also investigating whether the suspect was directly involved in the group’s killings.
The suspect, identified only as Holger G. in line with German privacy laws, is believed to have helped the group’s other three known members by providing them with documents and vehicles, one of which was apparently used in the killing of a police officer, prosecutors said. Two of the other group members are dead while the third turned herself in to police.
The group is suspected of having murdered eight people of Turkish origin and one Greek in several German cities between September 2000 and April 2006, as well as killing the police officer in the southwestern city of Heilbronn in April 2007.
The nine civilian victims were businessmen — including a flower wholesaler, a tailor and a kebab stall owner — who were shot at their workplaces.
The Heilbronn killing also has long been a mystery. The 22-year-old policewoman was fatally shot in the head in a park and a fellow officer was seriously wounded by gunshots.
Last week, both officers’ service weapons were found in a burning mobile home in central Germany where two men were found dead, in what police have said was an apparent suicide.
Prosecutors said they then found the pistol used in the earlier killings at the men’s apartment in the eastern city of Zwickau, which also burned out last week following an explosion.
The two men, identified only as Uwe B. and Uwe M., are believed to have had links to far-right circles at the end of the 1990s — along with a female acquaintance, identified as Beate Z., who turned herself in to police on Tuesday.
Prosecutors said that the available evidence “points to a far-right motivation for the murders.”
In Germany, federal prosecutors are responsible for investigations that involve suspicions of terrorism.
They said one aspect of the investigation was whether any “further people from far-right circles” were involved in the killings and whether the “terrorist organization” was also responsible for other crimes.
Germany’s far right is small, splintered and politically marginalized, but concern flares periodically about violence by extremists against immigrants and others. Germany is home to some 3 million people of Turkish origin.
