The only known survivor of a far-right group accused of a series of racist killings is now on trial. But the case has put the nation itself in the dock. The victims had little in common, apart from immigrant backgrounds and the modest businesses they ran. On 9 September , he was shot inside his van by two gunmen, and died in hospital two days later. The crime scenes indicated that the killers favoured a particular killing method. Typically, several shots were fired at close range to the face.
Police assumed that the professional method of killing, as well as the intimate nature of the murders β when they died, the victims were presumably looking directly into the eyes of their killers β meant that the murders must have been carried out by Turkish gangsters fighting out turf battles.
No hard evidence ever substantiated this theory. She said nothing, but the police continued to waste time and resources attempting to prove the killings were the work of Turkish gangs. Three years later, in , Mehmet Turgut, 25, was murdered in a kebab shop in the city of Rostock on the Baltic coast. The next attack came later that year in the form of a bomb detonated in the Keupstrasse area of Cologne β a part of town popular among Turkish immigrants.
Twenty-two people were wounded. The following year, a year-old Greek-German locksmith named Theodoros Boulgarides was killed in his newly opened shop in Munich. He was the first victim without a Turkish background. Only two days after that, Halit Yozgat, 21, was killed while sitting behind his desk in the internet cafe he ran in the central German city of Kassel, km away.
The killings occurred in seven different cities across Germany , and were often separated by months or years. This made it difficult to connect them, though no one expected it to take until for the authorities to grasp how they were related. From the very start, the investigation was riddled with basic errors and faulty assumptions. First, at least two of the murders took place at locations close to police stations, which should have made them unattractive sites for mafia murders. In , Alexander Horn, a young police profiler who prepared a report on the case for the Bosphorus team, began to cast doubts on the idea that the murders were connected to the Turkish mafia.
