State negligence up to the level of collusion.

Today marked the beginning of the concluding statement by counsel Antonia von der Behrens, who represents the youngest son of Mehmet Kubaşık. Elif and Gamze Kubaşık had come to Munich once more to hear her statement.

Antonia von der Behrens first dealt with the extent of the knowledge the various domestic secret service agencies had about Mundlos, Böhnhardt, Zschäpe and the NSU from the early 1990s up to November of 2011, and with the size of the network surrounding the NSU from whom they could derive such knowledge.

Even though her closing statement was not interrupted even once by a defense objection, it will only be finished next Tuesday. This is because Antonia von der Behrens has presented an extremely thorough overview of the development of the NSU from the “Section Jena” of the “Thuringia Home Guard”, the development towards the use of fake identities, the several phases of the activities of the NSU and its statements to others up to its self-uncovering in 2011. She also showed that given the many secret service informers, some of whom were leading cadres and even founders of the militant organizations in whose circles the NSU members moved, secret service agencies certainly knew about the emergence of the NSU and consciously decided not to intervene. Von der Behrens also detailed the many cases in which state agencies had knowledge of, for example, the whereabouts of Böhnhardt, Mundlos and Zschäpe, but decided not to take any action based on that knowledge.

We will deal with the entirety of the closing statement in more detail after its conclusion next Tuesday.