Right-wing extremist chat group: court rejects charges against Frankfurt police officers

When the "NSU 2.

Right-wing extremist chat group: court rejects charges against Frankfurt police officers

When the "NSU 2.0" threatening letters were investigated, a Frankfurt police chat group with right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic content was also exposed. The public prosecutor's office complains, but a setback occurs. The court relies on the nature of the chat.

In the proceedings regarding a chat group of Frankfurt police officers with right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic and other misanthropic content, the Frankfurt Regional Court did not allow the prosecutor's office to charge. A court spokesman announced that the opening of the main hearing was rejected with a decision dated February 13. In rejecting the charges, the spokesman said that the Criminal Court did not consider the content to be disseminated because it was a closed chat group. Accordingly, no sufficient suspicion of incitement to hatred and other offenses was seen.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office said the prosecution had lodged an immediate appeal against the court's decision. The Frankfurt Public Prosecutor's Office is now dealing with this complaint and will be evaluating the case in the coming weeks. The Higher Regional Court then decides on the appeal.

"Ultimately, this is a decision by the independent judiciary," said the Hessian CDU Interior Minister Peter Beuth about the indictment's denial. The content shared in the chat group was "completely unacceptable" and had "no ground on the Hessian police," emphasized the minister. "They are not compatible with the values ​​​​of the Hessian police at any point." Police officers who saw images from the chat group for training purposes were shocked by what colleagues shared there, Beuth said. "That cannot be reconciled with the values ​​of the Hessian police."

He referred to efforts by the state of Hesse to tighten laws at federal level. Accordingly, inciting statements by officials in the law should be able to be judged more sharply. This has not yet been implemented, the ball is in the hands of the Federal Minister of the Interior, said Beuth.

The chat group of officers from the first Frankfurt police station was uncovered in connection with the investigation into the "NSU 2.0" threatening letters. The Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz and her family were threatened with death and racially insulted in August 2018. The investigation revealed that the lawyer's personal data, which was not publicly available, had been retrieved from a police computer in the station shortly before the first threatening letter arrived. During further investigation, the investigators also came across the chat group.

Last November, a man from Berlin was sentenced to several years in prison as the person responsible for the threatening letters, which were later also directed against politicians and women in public life. Basay-Yildiz's co-plaintiffs had repeatedly doubted that he was responsible for the first threatening letter and had called for further investigations.