For the first time since her arrest, Beate Zschäpe responds directly to questions. At the same time, the NSU right-wing terrorist admits that she is partly to blame for the terrible series of murders.
Chemnitz - The convicted right-wing terrorist Beate Zschäpe has admitted before the Bavarian NSU investigative committee, according to her lawyer, more clearly than ever before a complicity in the series of murders of the "National Socialist Underground".
"She has admitted her complicity in the murders much more intensively today than in the trial," said Mathias Grasel after Zschäpe's hour-long questioning in the Chemnitz prison district of the dpar.
"It remains the same: There was no active participation, neither in the preparation nor in the implementation," Grasel emphasized. "But she said very clearly several times today: If I had acted and reacted differently after the first murder, nothing else would have happened."
That was the NSU
The terror cell "National Socialist Underground" (NSU) - Zschäpe, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt - had been murdering through Germany for years from 2000 onwards. Their victims were nine businessmen of Turkish and Greek origin and a German policewoman. Mundlos and Böhnhardt also carried out two bomb attacks in Cologne, injuring dozens of people.
The two killed themselves in 2011 to avoid arrest - only then was the NSU exposed. Zschäpe, the trio's only survivor, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018 after more than five years of trial - as an accomplice, even though there is no evidence that she herself was at a crime scene.
Zschäpe was questioned throughout Monday in a non-public meeting by the members of the Bavarian state parliament. It was the first time she had spoken out since the end of the trial, and the first time ever that Zschäpe had responded directly to questions. In the NSU trial, she had only expressed herself in written statements and answered questions in writing and only spoke twice herself - including in her closing remarks.
Zschäpe: Could have prevented crime
Grasel quoted from Zschäpe's testimony before the committee members: "I could have prevented the first murder from becoming a series. I would have had the opportunity and I didn't take it." According to Grasel, Zschäpe said: "I wrongly placed the lives of Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt above the lives of the victims."
Committee chairman Toni Schuberl (Greens) reported that Zschäpe had said that she had not wanted the deeds – but also that they had only been possible through her. She went on to say that she could have prevented the crimes: if she had turned herself in when she learned of the first murder. Dpa