Once more on the attack in 1998 – and on the amateurish investigations of the federal criminal police

The trial day today was quite short – the court closed the trial at shortly after 11 am.

The only witness today was the former disctrict mayor of Jena-Winzerla who was questioned about the buildings present at the site where an attack by several Neonazis on two young men had taken place in 1998 – accused Carsten Schultze had made a statement on that attack (see the report of 21 July 2016). The witness was unable to corroborate one detail of Schultze’s statement, concerning a small wooden hut into which, according to Schultze, one of the victims had been pushed. Other than that, his testimony did not lead to anything new.

The parties were presented with further parts of the case file, which shows once more how unbelievably amateurish the federal criminal police had investigated this attack (for an earlier example, concerning the statement by Böhnhardt and Mundlos that they had shot and hit someone, see the report of 1 September 2016): to start with, what Schultze described as an attack by six or more neo-Nazis on two people who allegedly had called one of them a “fucking Nazi” became, in the hands of the federal criminal police, a “brawl with leftist extremists”. And once more, in the three years since Schultze had reported on the attack, the police had been unable to even begin to clear up what had happened in 1998 – until a victim counsel presented an old newspaper article on the crime a few weeks ago (see the report of 31 August 2016). With this in hand, the investigation at least led to a few provisional results, the police was, e.g., able to find the EMTs who had transported one of the victims to the emergency room – in their first investigation, they had only looked at reports of EMTs working for the city, but had totally neglected to even check with charitable organizations such as the “Workers’ Samaritan Federation”, which also provide emergency medical services in Jena like they do in many other German cities. It remains to be seen whether the further investigations will be conducted with a bit more energy and whether they will lead to anything concrete.