According to the judges, Alexander M. from Berlin sent a series of hateful and racist threatening letters to lawyers, politicians, journalists and representatives of public life by e-mail, fax or text message.
The Frankfurt court on Thursday found the 54-year-old guilty of public incitement to commit crimes, incitement to hatred, disturbance of public order, use of anti-constitutional symbols, threats, assault on a law enforcement officer and insult. The suspect himself had rejected the allegations in his “last word” on Thursday.
The addressees of the threatening letters also included satirist Jan Böhmermann, presenter Maybritt Illner and comedian Idil Baydar. The series began in August 2018 with death threats against Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz and her family. The letters were signed “NSU 2.0” – an allusion to the right-wing extremist National Socialist Underground (NSU) terror cell.
The NSU murdered ten people in Germany between 2000 and 2007, most of them immigrants. He was also charged with two bombings and 15 bank robberies.
The public prosecutor had demanded seven and a half years in prison for, among other things, insult and attempted coercion, disturbance of public order and incitement to hatred. According to the public prosecutor’s plea, M. received the personal and publicly inaccessible data of the recipients from various police stations under false identities.
The defendant had made his own plea and asked for an acquittal. He was merely a member of a dark web chat group, which is why parts of the threatening letters were found on his computer. The threats were never serious, he added: “The NSU 2.0 project was just trolling at a high level.”
(SDA)