The Frankfurt public prosecutor's office has now filed charges against the alleged right-wing extremist chat group from the 1st Frankfurt police station, which has been under investigation for three years.

As the authority announced on Monday, there is one officer and four officers whose chat group "Itiotentreff" was uncovered in the course of the NSU 2.0 threatening letter against the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz.

They are charged with using signs of unconstitutional organizations, hate speech, depicting violence, insulting religious or ideological beliefs and property, and distributing pornographic writings.

Catherine Iskandar

Responsible editor for the "Rhein-Main" department of the Sunday newspaper.

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As the investigations revealed, the five officials founded the chat group mentioned on the WhatsApp messenger service in October 2014.

This is said to have "primarily been about the sharing of right-wing extremist, racist, anti-Semitic and inhuman content in the form of image and video sequences," said senior public prosecutor Nadja Niesen.

As has now become known, the group had also spread its content beyond that.

In different constellations, the accused are said to have been active in other chat groups, each with between 5 and 28 participants.

Specifically, they are accused of posting content with depictions of Adolf Hitler, swastikas and other National Socialist symbols as well as trivializing the Holocaust in the various chat groups in a total of 102 cases between October 2014 and October 2018 and minorities, in particular people with disabilities, with a migration background, with dark skin, homosexuals, Jews and Muslims, to have scorned and slandered.

Suspicion because of NSU 2.0

Furthermore, the accused are said to have transmitted photos and videos with pornographic content and content that glorifies violence.

They are said to have previously downloaded all of this content from social networks or received it from third parties.

You should have known that this criminally relevant content was regularly made available to people outside the chat group.

The charges against the officers from the 1st Revier are relevant because there is still a suspicion that the group was also involved in the NSU 2.0 threatening letters and helped to obtain the data of at least one of the victims.

The computer of the now accused police officer from the police station was used to query the lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz.

Shortly thereafter, she received the first threatening letter.