In the trial for the "NSU 2.0" threatening letter, the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office demanded a prison sentence of seven years and six months for the accused Alexander M. He is to be sentenced, among other things, for insult and attempted coercion, disturbance of the public peace and incitement to hatred.

On Monday, senior public prosecutor Sinan Akdogan accused M. in his closing speech before the Frankfurt district court of being the author of a total of 81 threatening letters sent by email, fax or SMS to lawyers, politicians, journalists and representatives of public life and labeled "NSU 2.0 " were signed. M. also sent bomb threats against courts.

Prosecutor convinced of the crime of the accused

There is no doubt that M. was the author. He collected personal data about the victims and posed as a police officer, among other things. It is a highly intelligent perpetrator in whose apartment books on "methods of manipulation" were found, among other things. The co-plaintiff, on the other hand, criticized the investigative approach of assuming a single perpetrator. At least for the very first threatening letter, an alternative offender should be considered. And the question of the extensive data queries about the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz had not been clarified from the point of view of the co-plaintiff.

M. had rejected the allegations in the process. The sender "NSU 2.0" alludes to the right-wing extremist terrorist cell National Socialist Underground (NSU).

Insufficiently determined?

Before the actual plea, Akdogan rejected allegations that the investigators had not investigated extensively and included other possible connections in their investigations. They worked under high pressure to clear up the "unspeakable and terrible series of threats".

The accusation that the investigation had not been carried out sufficiently was raised, among others, by the Frankfurt lawyer and joint plaintiff Seda Basay-Yildiz, who had also been threatened. She assumes that the first of the letters was not sent by the accused but by a Frankfurt police officer.

Akdogan criticized M.'s behavior in court: "We endured a lot from him. The accused got a stage here." At times he behaved like a "badly brought up child" - for example when he grinned and gave media representatives his middle finger on the first day of the trial or banged his fist on the table when a witness testified.

Prosecutor: The accused is a lone perpetrator

Prosecutor Akdogan explained that after the accused was arrested in Berlin, the series of threats ended with the e-mail address used up to that point. In his plea, he described how the investigators tracked down the accused. He also described in detail the content of the threatening letters and their effect on the recipients. M. acted alone. In view of the large number of recipients and the fear that the police could also have been involved, the letters were extremely stressful and sometimes traumatizing. The prosecutor pointed out that M. had repeatedly threatened women in the threatening letters full of racist, inhumane formulations: "He repeatedly attacked women explicitly, precisely because they were women."

Antonia von der Behrens, the lawyer for Basay-Yildiz, who is acting as a joint plaintiff, still saw unanswered questions despite the court's meticulous efforts to clarify the matter. "The NSU series of threats could be cleared up." On the other hand, from the point of view of the co-plaintiff, it was not clarified who sent the first threatening letter to her client in August 2018 and how M. got hold of the personal data.

Just before the first threatening fax, a total of 17 pieces of information about Basay-Yildiz and her family were queried in a total of three databases in the first police station in Frankfurt's inner city. According to the lawyer, it is incomprehensible that this extensive query was based on a telephone call from an alleged colleague. She assumes an alternative perpetrator - an officer at the station, who is also being investigated in connection with a right-wing extremist chat group. As a witness in the trial, he had exercised his right to remain silent.