German extreme right terrorists convicted

This video says about itself:

7 March 2018

A court in Germany has found 8 people guilty of being members of a right-wing terror organization. The verdict was handed down Wednesday after a yearlong trial of members of the so-called “Freital Group”. The ringleader was sentenced to ten years, the others are also serving prison terms, the shortest being four years. The terror cell was founded in eastern Germany and has been accused of firebombing two refugee homes and an office and car belonging to the left-wing, pro immigration Die Linke party. The aim of the attacks was to “generate a climate of fear and repression”. More than one million asylum seekers and refugees arrived in Germany in 2015 alone, many of them fleeing war in Syria.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV:

German terrorist group convicted of attacks on asylum seekers and politicians

Today, 4:30 PM

Members of the German right-wing extremist ‘Gruppe Freital’ have been sentenced to long prison terms for a series of attacks on asylum seekers and political targets. The seven men and a woman have received sentences ranging from four to ten years, including for forming a terrorist association and attempted murder.

The convicts are responsible for five attacks, in Freital and nearby Dresden. The targets were two residences where asylum seekers lived, a car of a left-wing politician, a party bureau of the Left party and a left-wing residential group. Two people were wounded.

The members (aged between 20 and 40) met each other in 2015 at demonstrations against the arrival of asylum seekers. The region around Dresden, where Freital is close by, was at that time a center of resistance against Chancellor Merkel and her asylum policy. The group is said to have wanted to silence dissenters and would like asylum seekers to leave the country by creating a “climate of fear”.

In addition, according to the justice department, they took killing people for granted. “It is very good luck that no people have been killed by the actions of the group.”

There was a lot of criticism of the police and the judiciary in this case. Particularly because the police quickly found out about the group, but the justice department did not seem to see the seriousness of the case. The case is said to have been neglected for too long. And when the justice department did decide to prosecute the group, it was not for terrorism, but for lesser offenses. The federal public prosecutor, who deals with terror cases, then took over the case.

The justice department is still investigating ten other suspects, among them allegedly three partners of the individuals now sentenced and a politician of the extreme right NPD party.

He didn’t know it yet, but the bombing was the first attack of a small group of local thugs and Nazi sympathizers known as the Freital Group. According to prosecutors, what started out as a loose association of far-right activists, football hooligans, and hate-filled anti-migrant Facebook groups soon spawned a terror organization. Its goal was clear: to drive out the few hundred refugees who’d recently settled in town, many of them fleeing conflict in Syria and Afghanistan, at any cost: here.