Petra Pau, a lawmaker who serves as a member of a parliamentary committee investigating the notorious crime spree of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground (NSU), accuses the state of Hessen for a cover-up attempt related to the case.
The NSU, which consisted of two men and a woman, were accused of the murders of Turks, a bomb attack targeting a Turkish neighborhood in Germany and a string of bank robberies between 2000 and 2007.
Speaking to Frankfurt Rundschau daily, Pau, a lawmaker from The Left Party, said officials in Hessen, where Internet cafe proprietor Halit Yozgat was fatally shot in 2006, hindered their investigation process. "They sent documents we needed about the case only hours before our meeting to assess the case and the Hessen administration try to avoid cooperating with us," Pau said in an interview. She said they had little time to read the comprehensive documents sent last-minute in a previous meeting, and it further delayed the investigation process.
Beate Zschaepe, the sole surviving member of the neo-Nazi gang, has been on trial since 2013. The case, as well as the investigation into the murders, has been criticized for failing to shed light on connections of the gang to the far-right scene and intimate ties between far-right and intelligence services. Intelligence services are accused of destroying evidence linking them to far-right activists with information on the NSU, which went unnoticed for years by authorities. The murders of eight Turks and a Greek national were blamed on domestic disputes within the Turkish community before the racist motives behind the murders were revealed, after Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, two other gang members, committed suicide, leaving behind a video showing the crimes they had committed.
Media reports say an intelligence officer was inside the Internet cafe Halit Yozgat ran at the time of the murder and left the scene after the killing.
Speaking on the fifth anniversary of the murder's discovery in November, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas has admitted "failure" on the part of the government and apologized to the families of the NSU victims for "mistakes" made by security forces in the investigation and thwarting the string of racist crimes. He said "many mistakes were made" and expressed his regrets in the case.
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