Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) - North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) has started a subsequent examination of murder cases for a right-wing extremist background. A ministry spokesman confirmed this on Wednesday. 25 cases with 30 fatalities in the past 40 years are to be checked. The "Tagesspiegel" had first reported on the test.
"Right-wing extremism is still one of the greatest threats to our democracy. That's why it's good and important that we look at and reassess borderline cases from the past," Reul told the newspaper.
Police work has evolved over the years. This also applies to the evaluation and analysis of right-wing homicides. The test is scheduled to last nine months, and the project entitled "ToreG NRW" (victims of right-wing violence in North Rhine-Westphalia) is headed by a political scientist at the State Criminal Police Office (LKA).
The aim is apparently to check the total number of official deaths from right-wing violence. Media initiatives come to significantly higher numbers. While 113 people have officially died at the hands of right-wing extremists in Germany since reunification, "Tagesspiegel" and "Zeit online" report 190 fatalities.
The LKA has already reclassified a spectacular case from 2003 as a right-wing motivated homicide. In October 2003, neo-Nazi Thomas A. shot dead a lawyer in Overath near Cologne, along with his wife and daughter. The lawyer had caused the debtor neo-Nazi to lose a farm where he had organized meetings of right-wing extremists.
The Cologne Regional Court sentenced him to the maximum sentence in 2004 and noted in the verdict that the Nazi ideas of the murderer played a role in the crime. The triple murder of neo-Nazi Michael B. in Dortmund and Waltrop in 2000 is now to be re-examined. B. had then shot three police officers.
