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The 1980 Beer Festival attack was an extreme right-wing attack

2020-07-09T01:15:03.190Z


The attack on the Munich Beer Festival in 1980, which left 12 people dead, is now officially considered a "far-right terrorist attack" , the German media reported on Tuesday, presenting the conclusions of the long investigation of the federal prosecutors. The assailant, Gundolf Koehler, had also been killed in the explosion of the bomb he had placed in a trash can at the entrance to the Fête, one ...


The attack on the Munich Beer Festival in 1980, which left 12 people dead, is now officially considered a "far-right terrorist attack" , the German media reported on Tuesday, presenting the conclusions of the long investigation of the federal prosecutors. The assailant, Gundolf Koehler, had also been killed in the explosion of the bomb he had placed in a trash can at the entrance to the Fête, one of the deadliest post-war attacks in Germany .

Read also: Germany: the risk of an attack on the far right remains "high" after Halle

Investigators had initially assumed that the 21-year-old geology student was depressed and had acted because of relationship difficulties and exam anxiety, downplaying the importance of his proven links with the far right. But other revelations about the extent of Koehler's involvement in far-right movements and speculation that he might not have acted alone had led prosecutors to reopen the investigation into 2014. They definitively concluded a carefully planned "far-right terrorist attack" , said a senior investigator quoted by the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Koehler trained in particular with the banned neo-Nazi militia "Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann" , had hung a "photo of Hitler above his bed" and wanted the return of Nazism in Germany. After questioning thousands of witnesses and combing close to 300,000 documents, investigators estimate that Koelher wanted the attack to be blamed on the far left, in the hopes of influencing the 1980 general election and allowing for a conservative candidate to become chancellor. Prosecutors have not found traces of accomplices. The investigation comes to an end as the country faces an increase in racist and anti-Semitic acts, with authorities often finding themselves accused of neglecting the danger posed by the far right.

A neo-Nazi is currently on trial for killing a local, openly pro-refugee politician and member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party Walter Lübcke last year. Last October, an armed man killed two people in an attack on a synagogue in Halle, in the east of the country. In February, a man killed nine people of foreign origin in two bars in Hanau, near Frankfurt. Far-right terrorism has been erected in recent months by the government and the security services as the number one threat to Germany.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-07-09

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