German woman gets life term for 10 neo-Nazi murders
Berlin, July 11 : The sole survivor of post-war Germany's deadliest neo-Nazi terror cell was on Wednesday sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 10 people in a seven-year campaign of shootings and nail bombings across Germany.
Beate Zschaepe, 43, of far-right group National Socialist Underground (NSU), was convicted after a five-year trial over the deaths of nine migrants between 2000 and 2006, and the killing of a woman police officer in 2007.
Eight of the victims were men of Turkish origin, one man was Greek. The verdict was handed down at a court in Munich, the Telegraph reported.
She was also found guilty of a series of nail bombings which targeted immigrant communities, including one in Cologne in 2004 in which 22 people were injured.
The court found that Zschaepe was a fully active member of the NSU, a secretive three-person terror cell whose existence was only discovered after the other two members and her former lovers, Uwe Boehnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, died in a suspected suicide pact in 2011.
They left behind a video confessing their crimes that led police to begin investigating the group in connection with the murders. The trio's white supremacist group NSU also carried out 15 bank robberies.
Lawyers for the woman earlier argued that she was not involved in the murders. Later, she admitted helping the two men but claimed she knew nothing of the killings.
The court rejected her claims and found she was fully complicit in the group's campaign of shootings and bombings. The killings had "Nazi racist motives" and were designed to spread "fear and insecurity" among immigrant communities, the judge found.
The trial was one of the longest in German history and one of the most scandalous as evidence emerged that police had failed to investigate right-wing motives in several of the murder cases.
Campaigners and lawyers for the victims' relatives accused German authorities of covering up the size and influence of the NSU, which operated in secret for almost 14 years. They claimed the group even had informants in the German security services.
Four others -- Ralf Wohlleben, Carsten S., Holger Gerlach and Andre Eminger were found guilty of lesser offences of aiding the terror cell.
The critics argued the trial had left unanswered questions over how much German intelligence knew about the NSU.
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AAP leaders once sought justice for Nirbhaya, today they are supporting an accused: Maliwal
New Delhi (PTI): AAP Rajya Sabha MP Swati Maliwal, who has been accused by her party of being part of a conspiracy to frame Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in a false case, on Sunday said her party colleagues once sought justice for Nirbhaya but today they are supporting a person accused of assaulting her.
She said if AAP leader and former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, who is in jail in connection with the Delhi excise police case, had been here "maybe things wouldn't have been so bad for me!"
Maliwal has alleged that Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's aide Bibhav Kumar assaulted her on May 13 when she went to the CM's residence to meet him. The Aam Aadmi Party has trashed her allegations and claimed Maliwal was acting at the behest of the BJP to frame Kejriwal in a fake case.
Maliwal, who has been associated with the AAP since its inception more than 10 years ago, said on Sunday there was a time when "we all used to come out on the streets to get justice for Nirbhaya".
"Today, 12 years later, we have come out on the streets to save the accused (Bibhav Kumar) who made the CCTV footage disappear and formatted the phone? I wish they had used this much force for Manish Sisodia ji. Had he been here, maybe things wouldn't have been so bad for me!" she wrote.
Police have arrested Kumar in connection with the case.
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