BERLIN, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- German Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz blamed the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Wednesday to be co-responsible for the fatal shooting in the city of Halle last week.
"The AfD cannot deny its responsibility in this matter," said Scholz in an interview with the German Funke Media Group after he was asked if the intellectual agitator for the shooting in Halle could also be found at the AfD.
On Wednesday last week, the right-wing extremist Stephan B. had killed two people after unsuccessfully trying to enter a synagogue on the Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism.
Stephan B. was shortly arrested and admitted right-wing extremist as well as anti-Semitic motivations for the crime.
"The racist-motivated act originated in a milieu that not only shouts slogans from the right on the internet" but also in the parliaments of Germany's federal states as well as in the governmental parliament in Berlin, said Scholz in the interview on Wednesday.
"The AfD should not act as if it had nothing to do with all this," added Scholz.
Several other German politicians had already blamed the AfD, which had been the third strongest party in the last German parliamentary elections in 2017, to be co-responsible for the shooting in Halle.
Some of the representatives of the AfD would have attracted attention as "spiritual arsonists" in an "outrageous manner", Joachim Herrmann, interior minister of the German federal state Bavaria, told the public radio Bayern 2 one day after the shooting in Halle.
Last Sunday, Germany's Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer had described the AfD as the "political arm of right-wing radicalism" in Germany during a speech at the annual meeting of the Junge Union, the youth organization of Germany's governing Christian Democratic Union.
