A group of right-wing extremists have been arrested in Germany after planning attacks on Muslims and asylum seekers to try to provoke civil strife.
Germany authorities arrested 12 men on Friday in nationwide raids on suspicion of forming and supporting a “right-wing terrorist organisation”. A judge on Saturday ordered the men to be held in detention.
Four of the men were part of an active cell with the eight others viewed as supporters, according to a statement by German prosecutors. They were all German and one of the men was reportedly a police administrative officer.
The Welt am Sonntag weekly reported on Sunday that the group referred to itself as "The Hard Core" and was founded in September 2019. The group had links to a white supremacist group called Soldiers of Odin, founded in Finland in 2015, it said.
The co-ordinator of the group was identified as Werner S, 53, who arranged a series of meetings for the plotters.
Werner S, from the Augsburg region, had been on the authorities’ radar for several month and was seen as a potential violent threat, German media said.
The group’s goal was to “shake and ultimately overcome the state” prompting social upheaval in Germany, according to prosecutors. “For this purpose, attacks on politicians, asylum seekers and persons of Muslim faith, which have not yet been specified in detail, should bring about conditions similar to civil war,” the federal prosecutor said in a statement.
Authorities in Germany have warned of the growing threat of far-right extremism. Last June, a regional official from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party was killed by a suspected neo-Nazi. In October, a gunman with anti-Semitic views attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle, killing two passers-by.
The arrests come amid political turmoil in Germany with the heir apparent as chancellor to Mrs Merkel dropping out of the race to succeed her.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer's decision came after her authority had been undermined by local party officials. They had ignored her orders not to side with a far-right party in elections to try to oust a left-wing governor.
The move by members of the Christian Democratic Union to back the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) was unheard of in modern post-Second World War politics.
