BERLIN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Politicians and experts in Germany are equally alarmed by the recent murder of Kassel district President Walter Luebcke. On Wednesday, German media reported that the suspect might not have acted on his own.
The suspicion that the perpetrator did not act alone was based on a witness report, according to information published by Sueddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR. The witness allegedly noticed two cars leaving the scene in an "aggressive manner" just 20 minutes after the witness had heard a shot.
Hermann Schauss, interior affairs expert of the Left Party (Die Linke) in the Hessian state parliament, has cautioned against the hasty classification of the suspect as an individual offender. "The north Hessian neo-Nazi scene is extremely violent and has good connections with Dortmund, for example, but also with right-wing extremists in Lower Saxony and Thuringia."
Schauss recalled that already during the Munich National Socialist Underground (NSU) trial, which took place between 2013 and 2018, too little focus was placed on the right-wing extremist scene. The current investigations would now open up an opportunity to take a more thorough look at the neo-Nazi networks in Germany.
Hajo Funke, a political scientist and expert on right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism, told the German press agency dpa on Wednesday that a nationwide network of right-wing extremists was at work in many regions in Germany.
Funke warned against trivialization and "denial," and also against repeating the mistakes committed during the NSU investigations, when the authorities failed to establish a connection to right-wing extremism for a very long time.
"Now the high alert has been sounded. The danger of further right-wing terrorist attacks is high," Funke said, calling for more consistent action by German security forces. "Wherever the police chief is weak or the interior minister does not want to intervene properly, we observe the spread of right-wing extremists."
German cities and towns are concerned about the security of politicians. "Unfortunately, local politicians in particular have also been more exposed to threats and hostility in recent years," Leipzig's Mayor Burkhard Jung, president of the Association of German Cities and Towns, told the German media network RND.
District President Luebcke, who was murdered on June 2, had been threatened in the past because of his supportive attitude towards refugees. At an information meeting on a planned refugee shelter in 2015, Luebcke addressed his critics and said that anyone who did not share certain values of living together could leave Germany.
