The high-security trial of Stephan Ernst, a neo-Nazi sympathizer, alleged murderer of Walter Lübcke, an elected official favorable to the reception of migrants, opened on Tuesday, June 16, in Frankfurt. Almost a year ago, this murder had raised the specter of far-right terrorism in Germany.

The hearing aroused great interest from the public and the media, some of whom waited part of the night before the Regional High Court in Frankfurt. It is indeed the first time since the Second World War that a case of this type has been tried in Germany.

"Send a clear signal against hatred and violence"

During the night of June 2, 2019, Walter Lübcke, 65-year-old elected representative of Angela Merkel's CDU conservative party, smokes a cigarette on the terrace of his house in Cassel, Hesse, when he is shot in the head pulled almost at close range.

After two weeks of investigation, a suspect, Stephan Ernst, 46, close to the neo-Nazi movement, is arrested and confesses to the crime, before withdrawing and accusing an alleged accomplice. Without convincing the investigators.

The German Federal Prosecutor's Office, responsible for the most sensitive cases, accuses him of "aggravated murder" and "attempted aggravated murder". He faces life imprisonment after a trial scheduled at least until the end of October.

The victim's wife and two sons, who joined the proceedings, were keen to attend the trial in order to "send a clear signal against hatred and violence," said the family spokesman, Dirk Metz, before the opening of the trial. Their lawyer Holger Matt said he was convinced that it was "a planned murder in cold blood, cowardly and treacherous, with the lowest motivations".  

An alleged accomplice     

Ernst is not alone in the accused's box. His alleged accomplice, presented as Markus Hartmann, is accused of having trained him in shooting in the forest, "including with the weapon used" for the murder, without being "aware of the real plans of the attack" .

The two suspects also, according to investigators, attended a public meeting together during which Walter Lübcke had supported the generous policy of welcoming migrants decided in 2015 by Chancellor Angela Merkel. The elected official had gone, during this intervention, which ulcerated the far-right movement, to the point of inviting opponents of the arrival of refugees to leave Germany.

From this meeting, Stephan Ernst, also accused of an attempted murder in 2016 with a stabbed weapon of an Iraqi asylum seeker, increasingly projected his xenophobic hatred on Walter Lübcke, considers the prosecution. Investigations into his computer equipment also revealed, according to several media, that he had other potential targets in sight: elected officials and a synagogue.

The accused has been known to the authorities for a long time as a neo-Nazi sympathizer with violent potential. Despite his busy past, the intelligence services had stopped monitoring him in recent years.             

Police flaws        

The investigation revealed another police error, already accused in the past of complacency with neo-Nazis: it did not report to the licensing authority that the alleged accomplice was a still active member of the ultra-right. This enabled him to obtain pistols and rifles.

Underestimated in the 2000s by the authorities despite the murders of eight Turkish immigrants, a Greek and a German policewoman by a neo-Nazi group, the threat of far-right terrorism is perceived today as a crucial challenge for internal security.

On the sidelines of this trial, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called on the Germans to take an active stand against racism. "It is not enough not to be racist, we must be anti-racist," he said.

In October 2019, a far-right sympathizer almost committed a massacre on the day of Yom Kippur, in a synagogue in Halle, in the east of the country. He finally turned his gun on a passerby and killed a man in a snack bar. In February, a man killed nine people of foreign origin in two bars in Hanau, near Frankfurt, and then committed suicide.

With AFP

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