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Frankfurt / Main / Berlin (dpa) - After the suspected author of the right-wing extremist "NSU 2.0" threat was arrested, the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office will comment on the case again on Wednesday (2 p.m.).
A 53-year-old man was arrested in Berlin on Monday evening.
The unemployed German is strongly suspected of having sent a series of threatening letters nationwide with inflammatory and insulting content since August 2018.
He is in custody.
The letters were signed with “NSU 2.0”, alluding to the series of murders by the right-wing extremist terrorist cell, the National Socialist Underground (NSU).
According to investigators, it seems obvious that the man on the phone pretended to be an employee of the authorities in order to ask various police stations about non-public personal data for the threatening letters.
Because of the queries on the police computers in Frankfurt, Wiesbaden and Berlin, the police had come under great pressure.
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Most of the recipients of the threatening letters were public figures.
These included, for example, the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz, who represented victims' families in the Munich trial of the NSU murders, the cabaret artist Idil Baydar and today's Left Party leader Janine Wissler.
Lengthy investigations led to the trail of the 53-year-old.
The investigators targeted right-wing populist platforms and forums.
They noticed a user in the “PI News” forum, whose posts were similar in form and style to threatening letters.
A linguistic analysis by the BKA corroborated the suspicion.
Although the sender of the threatening letters knew how to hide his traces by using foreign servers, according to investigators, a user profile on a chess platform played an important role.
There was a profile with the same name on “PI-News”, whose users used the same cartoon character as their profile picture.
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Based on the same IP address and verbal insults in the chat on the chess platform, other profiles could be determined according to the information.
The investigators also derived a connection to Berlin from the comments.
Inquiries to the operator of the chess platform and to communication providers ultimately led to the identification of the man who has now been arrested.
According to the investigators, the 53-year-old is suspected of having threatened a lawyer in Würzburg by telephone before the start of the “NSU 2.0” series in 2017.
"The background for the threat is likely to have been the representation of a Syrian refugee by this lawyer," reported the investigators.
His client was attacked after a "media-effective selfie" with Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) in a refugee home in 2015.
According to previous findings, Interior Minister Beuth sees the Hessian police exonerated.
"The threatening letters had a very serious suspicion on the police," he said.
"According to everything we know today, a Hessian police officer was never responsible for the" NSU 2.0 "threatening mail series."
A spokeswoman for the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office said the investigations into the illegal data queries on Hessian police computers continued.
A relation of the man to Hessen is currently not known.
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According to the investigators, the suspect had already attracted attention in the past due to numerous - including right-wing motivated - crimes.
In 1992 he pretended to be a criminal investigator, which is why he was later convicted of presumption of office.
He is now being investigated on grounds of suspicion of sedition, the use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations, the threat and the insult, among other things.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210505-99-471561 / 2