In the summer of 2018, celebrities such as Jan Böhmermann and Maybritt Illner, as well as lawyers and politicians, received racist threatening letters – signed “NSU 2.0”. Now the Frankfurt Regional Court has sentenced the 54-year-old defendant M. to a long prison sentence.
In the Frankfurt trial about the “NSU 2.0” threatening letter, the accused was sentenced to five years and ten months in prison. According to the judges, Alexander M., who comes from Berlin, sent a series of 81 hateful and racist threatening letters to lawyers, politicians, journalists and representatives of public life by e-mail, fax or SMS.
The Frankfurt regional court found the 54-year-old guilty of public incitement to commit crimes, incitement to hatred, disturbance of the public peace, use of anti-constitutional symbols, threats, an assault on a law enforcement officer and insults.
The accused himself had again rejected the allegations in his “last word”. The addressees of the threatening letters also included satirist Jan Böhmermann, presenter Maybritt Illner and cabaret artist Idil Baydar. The series began in August 2018 with death threats against the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz and her family. The letters were signed “NSU 2.0” – an allusion to the right-wing extremist terrorist cell National Socialist Underground (NSU).
The prosecution had called for seven and a half years in prison for, among other things, insult and attempted coercion, disturbance of the public peace and incitement to hatred. According to the public prosecutor’s pleading, M. received the personal and publicly inaccessible data of the recipients from various police stations under false identities.
The defendant had made his own plea and asked for an acquittal. He was only a member of a chat group on the dark web, which is why parts of the threatening letters were found on his computer. The threats were never serious, he added: “The NSU 2.0 project was just trolling at a high level.”
The joint plaintiffs – the member of the Bundestag Martina Renner (Die Linke) and the Frankfurt lawyer Basay-Yildiz – had demanded further clarification. At least for the first letter, there were doubts that M was the perpetrator. The defense also criticized the fact that the public prosecutor’s office assumed a single perpetrator and pointed to a police officer from the 1st police station in Frankfurt, whose role in the proceedings had not been sufficiently clarified.
