Death threats linked to police computers and the discovery of far-right chat groups in police departments across Germany have fed concerns about far-right infiltration. Traveling for work and far from home, Seda Basay-Yildiz received a chilling fax at her hotel: “You filthy Turkish sow,” it read. “We will slaughter your daughter.” A German defense lawyer of Turkish descent who specializes in Islamist terrorism cases, Ms. Basay-Yildiz was used to threats from the far right. But this one, which arrived late one night in August 2018, was different. Signed with the initials of a former neo-Nazi terrorist group, it contained her address, which was not publicly available because of the earlier threats. Whoever sent it had access to a database protected by the state. “I knew I had to take this seriously — they had our address, they knew where my daughter lives,” Ms. Basay-Yildiz recalled in an interview. “And so for the first time I actually called the police.” It would bring her little sense of security: An investigation soon showed that the information had been retrieved from a police computer. Far-right extremism is resurgent in Germany, in ways that are new and very old, horrifying a country that prides itself on dealing honestly with its murderous past. This month, a two-year parliamentary inquiry concluded that far-right networks had extensively penetrated German security services, including its elite special forces. But increasingly, the spotlight is turning on Germany’s police, a much more sprawling and decentralized force with less stringent oversight than the military — and with a more immediate impact on the everyday safety of citizens, experts warn. (…) Police forces across Germany blamed immigrants, failing to recognize that the perpetrators were wanted neo-Nazis, while paid informers of the intelligence service helped hide the group’s leaders. Files on the informers were shredded by the intelligence service within days of the story’s exploding into the public in 2011. After a five-year trial that ended only in July 2018, Ms. Basay-Yildiz won her clients modest compensation but not what they had most hoped for: answers. “How big was that network and what did state institutions know?” said Ms. Basay-Yildiz. “After 438 days in court we still don’t know.” Three weeks after the trial finished, she received her first threat by fax. They have not stopped since. Ms. Basay-Yildiz represents precisely the kind of change in Germany that the far right despises. But she is not the only one. Police computers in Hesse have been used to call up data on a Turkish-German comedian, Idil Baydar, as well as a left-wing politician, Janine Wissler, who both received threats. The police president of the state failed to report it for months. He had to resign in July.
via nytimes: She Called Police Over a Neo-Nazi Threat. But the Neo-Nazis Were Inside the Police.
Von <a href=”//commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Kallesch&action=edit&redlink=1″ class=”new” title=”User:Kallesch (page does not exist)”>Kalle Schmitz</a> – <span class=”int-own-work” lang=”de”>Eigenes Werk</span>, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link – symbolbild