Verdict Due In Murder Of German Pro-migration Politician
A German court will rule on Thursday in a neo-Nazi trial accused of murdering immigrant politician Walter Lübcke. The killings shocked the country and highlighted the heightened threat to the far right of the right wing.
According to federal prosecutors, the suspect, 46-year-old Stephen Ernst, was motivated by “racism and alien exclusion” allegedly shooting Rubke from his head on June 1, 2019. Second World War.
The next day, a conservative politician was found dead on his terrace near the city center of Kassel, and an autopsy showed him shot dead at close range.
To summarize the December case, the prosecution demanded life imprisonment from Ernst.
It also accused co-defendant Marcus Hartman of helping Ernst in weapons training, accusing him of being an accessory to the killing, and asked him for nine years and eight months.
65-year-old Luebkke was a member of the conservative CDU party of Chancellor Angela Merkel and headed the Kassel District Parliament in western Hessen.
He upheld Markel’s 2015 decision to open the border to refugees and agreed to accept asylum seekers in his local town.
Prosecutors believe that Ernst and his accomplices attended Luebkke’s speech in October 2015 when politicians defended refugee assistance, and anyone who disagrees with these values ”freely leave the country.” You can leave, “he added.
This statement was widely shared online and turned Luebkke into a far-right hater.
After the speech, Ernst told Rubke that he “increasedly projected his hatred for foreigners,” the prosecutor said at the beginning of the June trial.
Following a mass sexual assault by immigrants on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 and a Muslim attack in Nice, France in 2016, Ernst is said to have begun to track the movement of Lübucke.
Between 2016 and 2018, prosecutors said he worked with Hartman to improve his firearm skills, and the two participated in a right-wing demonstration together.
In the process of their investigation, prosecutors separately charged Ernst with attempted murder in 2016 on charges of stabbing an Iraqi asylum seeker.
They also discovered weapons and ammunition owned by Ernst, such as revolvers, pistols, and submachine guns.
Ernst initially acknowledged the murder of Lübucke, but later withdrew his confession, saying Hartmann had triggered it.
However, he subsequently dismissed his defense counsel, returned to his original confession, and claimed to have been forced to blame Hartmann.
Ernst has a long criminal history and was known to the police as a neo-Nazi sympathizer.
He was convicted in 1993 of an attempted bomb attack on an asylum facility. German media said he participated in a neo-Nazi clash targeting a 2009 union demonstration.
However, Ernst then dropped off the radar of security services, fueling criticism that authorities did not take the far-right threat seriously enough.
German police committed racist crimes after it was revealed that the Neo-Nazi terrorist organization, the National Socialist Underground, had killed 10 people, mainly immigrants, during the year 2000. I fired it a few years ago because I overlooked it.
In October 2019, just months after Luebkke’s death, Germany was shot in the synagogue of the eastern city of Halle, killing two people.
Neo-Nazi Stephen Barriette, 28, was sentenced to life imprisonment in December for the attack and lamented the worst anti-Semitic atrocities in the country since World War II.
In February last year, another shooter shot and killed nine immigrants in downtown Hanau.
Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has declared the far-right radicalism “the greatest security threat facing Germany.”
He promised stricter security measures, such as cracking down on online hate speech.
Verdict Due In Murder Of German Pro-migration Politician Source link Verdict Due In Murder Of German Pro-migration Politician
