A trio of neo-Nazis recently linked to 10 hate murders were helped by other people now being sought by police, the chairman of Germany's parliamentary intelligence committee said Tuesday in Berlin.
The revelation that the unsolved murders, dating back to 2000, were the work of the extremists has brought demands for a purge of intelligence agents who failed to spot the trio and even raised fears that the neo-Nazis might have been protected by anti-subversion agencies.
After a briefing by intelligence chiefs, Thomas Oppermann, a Social Democratic legislator who chairs the committee, said, “There is evidence of further helpers. I don't want to say more.”
He said further disclosure might imperil the inquiry.
Oppermann called for a national memorial ceremony to be organisedd to honour the victims. So far investigators believe the trio, calling themselves the National Socialist Underground (NSU), killed eight ethnic Turkish businessmen, a Greek man and a female police officer.
“The helpers must be caught and punished harshly,” Oppermann said.
A retired intelligence chief, meanwhile, issued a statement to deny that the gang had ever worked for him as informers.
Helmut Roewer, former director of Thuringia state's anti-subversion department, said they had never been paid informers while his agents were tracking them, nor had there been plans to hire them.
“That would have been completely incompetent and senseless,” said Roewer, who retired in June 2000.
Uwe Boenhardt and Uwe Mundlos, who died November 4 by suicide, and Beate Zschaepe, who is in custody, claimed responsibility for the killings, lasting from 2000 to 2007, in a digital video clip found in the trio's home and also mailed anonymously to Thuringia officials.
A man who allegedly lent his identity papers to the trio was remanded in custody late Monday. ARD public television said it had identified another man who helped the gang to rent their apartments.
Roewer blamed state police for the failure to arrest the trio in 1998 on bombing charges before they vanished underground, charging that there were “very serious suspicions of illegal irregularities at the police” at the time. He gave no details.
The anti-subversion department of another state, Hesse, refused comment on allegations that one of its full-time agents was present during a 2006 killing, yet did not identify the assailant to police.
The department said police had investigated the man, who claimed he left the scene one minute before the killing of Halit Yozgat, 21, operator of an internet cafe in the city of Kassel. Police closed the file on the agent in 2007.
A newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said the agent had now been suspended as the department rechecked the evidence.
“This man evidently had strongly right-wing views,” said Oppermann in Berlin.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat Party (CDU) meanwhile backed her in a call to outlaw a far-right party,
The National Democratic Party (NPD), which has never won seats in Germany's federal parliament, denies it is neo-Nazi, but neo-Nazis actively canvass for it at elections.
A bid in 2001 to ban the anti-immigrant NPD failed over constitutional technicalities, but Merkel now says lawyers should study ways to circumvent those legal issues.
Her proposal to review the options was adopted unanimously on the final day of the CDU annual conference in Leipzig.
German television broadcast extracts from the video in which the NSU spliced together images of the bodies of the nine immigrant shopkeepers they admitted killing. The video mixed the images with footage from a 1960s film of a cartoon character, the Pink Panther.
The video also admitted bomb attacks against immigrant homes and shops.
Investigators found in the gang's home a gun used to kill the police officer in 2007. - Sapa-dpa