Killing of German Politician Is Treated as Possible Terrorist Act

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/world/europe/germany-terrorism-walter-lubcke.html

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BERLIN — Germany’s attorney general’s office took over on Monday the investigation into the killing of a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right party, days after the authorities arrested a suspect with a history of violence and ties to far-right extremists.

Federal prosecutors take over cases that are thought to be politically motivated and pose a nationwide threat. They said that they were still investigating whether others may have been involved in the death of the official, Werner Lübcke, but said that so far they had no indication that a terrorist organization was involved.

The prosecutors assumed control of the investigation into Mr. Lübcke’s death two weeks after he was killed and as the authorities began to treat his case as possibly the first case of fatal right-wing terrorism since a killing spree by a far-right terror cell ended in 2007.

The suspect, a 45-year-old German citizen with longstanding ties to right-wing extremists, was identified and arrested after DNA found on the victim’s clothes was matched to him in a criminal database, the authorities said.

“We are working on the assumption that the crime has a right-wing extremist background,” said Markus Schmitt, the spokesman for the federal agency. Speaking at a news conference on Monday afternoon, Mr. Schmitt said that the agency’s assessment was based on the suspect’s known opinions and record, and that prosecutors did not have evidence of a wider conspiracy but were still investigating.

Mr. Lübcke, 65, served as a member of the center-right Christian Democrats on a regional council in Hesse, a state in Central Germany. The prosecutors’ announcement was made just two days after his funeral in Kassel, and after two weeks of speculation about why a popular, if unobtrusive, local functionary could have been killed at his home on a Saturday night with a shot to his head, apparently at close range.

Germany has strict gun laws, and while nonregistered guns do exist, gun murders remain rare, especially in small and midsize cities.

The federal authorities identified the suspect as Stephan E., in keeping with German privacy laws. They said that among the evidence found in his apartment, there were digital storage devices that still needed to be fully analyzed.

According to German news reports, the suspect had a history of involvement in right-wing violence, including an attack on a refugee camp in 1993 and on a union gathering a decade ago. He was thought to be active in the local branch of the N.P.D., a neo-Nazi party, according to the news outlets. Besides those, the man seems to have had a past of violence and was known to police, according the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a major newspaper, and other outlets.

Mr. Lübcke, 65, was found shot in the head on his terrace on June 2. After failing to find a trace of the weapon, investigators quickly ruled out a suicide and had instead focused on finding a personal motive for the killing. The police briefly arrested someone with personal ties to Mr. Lübcke last week, but released the person after questioning.

The police also considered a political motive. In 2015, Mr. Lübcke was known to have provoked the ire of the far right, when a video of him giving a speech to a local audience showed him suggesting that anyone who did not support taking in refugees could leave Germany themselves.

”Both the murder as well as the mockery after Mr. Lübcke’s death shows that the hate is not just against ethnic minorities, but their supporters as well,” said Hajo Funke, a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin who studies right-wing extremism. Mr. Funke called the killing “ice-cold murder.”

The 2015 video of Mr. Lübcke supporting refugees went viral in right-wing circles: one blog post on a far-right news site went so far as to list Mr. Lübcke’s work address and telephone numbers.

Indeed, the death of Mr. Lübcke set off a chorus of jubilation among some members of the far right on social media, a response that President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany condemned as “cynical, tasteless, despicable and in every way disgusting.”

Kassel, the midsize western city where the killing occurred, was the site of another gun attack carried out by far-right terrorists in 2006, when Halit Yozgat was shot twice in the head, the ninth victim of a terrorist group that called itself the Nationalist Socialist Underground.

The authorities’ reaction to the N.S.U. killing spree was widely criticized, first for their slow pace in realizing it was right-wing terrorism and then for their struggle to put an end to it.

“It’s not the N.S.U., but it’s similar in both ideology and execution,” said Mr. Funke.