In the trial against the alleged author of the "NSU 2.0" threatening letter, the accused rejected all allegations in a statement that was sometimes contradictory and mostly presented in an aggressive tone and in return raised serious allegations against the investigating authorities.

Alexander M. said on Thursday before the Frankfurt Regional Court that he had not sent any threatening letters and committed no crimes.

Julian Staib

Political correspondent for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland based in Wiesbaden.

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The 54-year-old Berliner is accused of sending more than a hundred threatening letters between August 2018 and March 2021.

Many of them were marked with the abbreviation "NSU-2.0";

M. is accused of insult, coercion and threats in a large number of cases.

Doubts about the origin of the data

In many cases, non-public data of the threatened and their family members were used in the threatening letters - for example in the case of the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz.

The prosecution does not go into where M. is said to have gotten the data from.

After his arrest, investigators said he had inquired about this over the phone from the police station, posing as an officer.

This is also doubted by those affected by the threatening letters in view of the large number of data.

For a long time, a right-wing extremist chat group of the police was the focus of the investigation;

from the identifier of one of the participants, a data request for Basay-Yildiz was made shortly before the first threat was received.

Therefore, it was assumed that the chat group could be related to the threatening letters.

M. accused the public prosecutor's office on Thursday of "trickery" and called for the proceedings to be suspended.

There is "no reliable evidence" against him.

He himself was identified as a "useful idiot" who, due to his criminal record, could be blamed for "everything".

It would have been impossible for him to get hold of such “top secret official information” over the phone.

M. denies having sent threatening letters to Basay-Yildiz

M. stated that he was part of a closed chat group in which he believed the "so-called NSU-2.0" had been "coordinated".

Access data for an encrypted archive was shared in the group.

Police officers were probably also active in the chat group – but he could not prove that.

It was "namely" against Basay-Yildiz that was "rushed", said M. Because of the lawyer there was "enormous trouble".

The reason was also that an officer of the Hessian police committed suicide due to the resignation of the Hessian police chief.

That was "insider knowledge" of the police, according to M. The group said that Basay-Yildiz should be "filled with empty threats" and "imitation" was requested.

M. denied having sent threats to Basay-Yildiz himself.

M. said he was added to the chat group by an acquaintance in mid-2019.

The group was about "right-wing politics", the discussions were "extremely exciting and funny", even if the tone was "under all sow".

For example, "the Jewish world conspiracy" was discussed.

He wrote in the chat that he "couldn't recognize" that such a thing was "completely overestimated".

Germans who voted for left-wing parties are to blame for everything.

M said he left the group in the summer of 2020. He later spoke of his exclusion from the group.

M. stated that he could name members of the group, but that would be "to his disadvantage" and he would then have to go to a "witness protection program".

M. didn't want to answer questions

M. also contradicted other charges, he had not violated the gun law, had not resisted law enforcement officers;

According to the indictment, the numerous child and youth pornographic recordings on his data carriers are “completely normal pornography”.

M. did not want to answer questions about his explanation.

He also refused to give the court access to apparently still encrypted files on his computer.

A representative of the public prosecutor's office contradicted M.'s statements. Many points in his statement could be "immediately refuted".

For example, the death of a police officer in Hesse, whom M. had called a suicide, was public knowledge.

A lawyer representing co-plaintiff Basay-Yildiz in court said there was no doubt that M. was "perpetrator".

He was trying “quite obviously to exploit gaps that actually exist in the investigations”.

For example, that it is partly open where the data from the threatening letters came from.

But many of the allegations made by M. could easily be refuted - such as the one that Basay-Yildiz came into focus after the Hessian police chief resigned.

The resignation did not take place until 2020, but the first threatening letter to Basay-Yildiz was received in August 2018.

M. repeatedly interrupted the statements of the representative of the joint prosecutor, despite repeated admonitions from the judge, and insulted the lawyer.