Augsburg (dpa / lby) – The Bavarian member of the state parliament Markus Bayerbach was acquitted on Friday of the accusation of false suspicion of an ex-employee. The Augsburg district court assumed that the politician, who used to be active in the AfD but has since resigned, did not knowingly accuse a former employee during a police interrogation. The investigation was about AfD data that belittles refugees or downplays Nazi terror.
The background to the process was that in 2019 Bayerbach’s personal advisor had resigned from working for the AfD parliamentary group. It is Andreas Jurca, who was also the mayoral candidate for the party in Augsburg in 2020. There was a rift between Bayerbach and Jurca, and the deputy filed a complaint because Jurca had deleted his work computer.
When restoring the data, a folder called “AfD Witze” was found on a hard drive. The police classified 38 files as criminally relevant because they violated the human dignity of foreigners, downplayed Nazi rule or showed signs of unconstitutional organizations.
Bayerbach told the police that these files could be assigned to Jurca – this ultimately turned out to be wrong. Judge Silke Knigge said at the verdict that there was great doubt that Bayerbach knew when he testified that the data did not come from Jurca.