The trial against a 53-year-old man from Berlin, who is accused of having sent dozens of threatening letters signed “NSU 2.0” against public figures, begins this Wednesday morning at the Frankfurt Regional Court.

The indictment accuses him of a variety of crimes, including insult in 67 cases, attempted coercion, threats, dissemination of signs of unconstitutional organizations, public incitement to commit crimes, hate speech, possession of child and youth pornography and a violation of the Weapons Act.

Julian Staib

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

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The case had caused a stir for years.

As early as August 2018, the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz, who represented relatives of a murder victim in the Munich NSU trial, received a first threatening letter that contained her non-public address and threats against her family, including her named then two-year-old Daughter.

Many more threatening letters to the lawyer and to many other recipients followed.

More than 100 threatening letters were received in total.

For years, the Hessian security authorities themselves were suspected of being at least the starting point of the threats, after all, after the request for personal data from Basay-Yildiz became known in a Frankfurt police station, a right-wing extremist chat group consisting of police officers from just that station was busted.

The participants had sent right-wing extremist statements and pictures.

Shortly before the first threatening fax was sent, an extensive query of the lawyer's data is said to have taken place from the account of one of the participants.

But who did it is still unclear.

The cops are suspended.

So far, however, there has apparently been no connection to the accused.

Furthermore, it is also questionable how the accused got to a new residential address of Basay-Yildiz that was blocked by the security authorities,

For this reason, Hesse's security authorities have been criticized for years.

Even her boss, Minister of the Interior Peter Beuth (CDU), no longer ruled out a right-wing extremist network in the police after more and more cases became known in which threatening letters with the abbreviation "NSU 2.0" contained data that had just been accessed by Hessian police officers had been.

The news of the arrest of the unemployed IT technician from Berlin, who was not on the police force, acted like a liberating blow.

This took place in May 2021 in Berlin.

The investigators tracked down the accused by comparing his language in comments on a right-wing populist website and in a chess forum with the language used in the threatening letters.

From the point of view of the investigators, the accused is said to have obtained the data of the persons concerned by telephone by pretending to be an employee of the authorities.

He is said to have had no supporters from the police.

But there are doubts about that.

Shortly before the trial began, among others, Basay-Yildiz, the cabaret artist ldil Baydar and the two left-wing politicians Martina Renner and Janine Wissler, who had all received threatening letters, made a statement saying that it was “a scandal that the investigations against an alleged lone culprit".

The "NSU 2.0" complex was "not cleared up" with the arrest of the accused, there were "compelling indications of at least targeted data transfer from police circles." However, whether the process is able to clarify the question of how the accused might have gotten hold of the data and whether there were accomplices in the ranks of the police remains to be seen.

The defendant is expected to make a statement on the second day of the hearing, Thursday.