Ralf Wohlleben, a defendant accused of supplying weapons to the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a neo-Nazi gang involved in the murders of Turks as well as several bomb attacks, denied charges at a hearing yesterday.
Wohlleben was the second defendant in the case to break their silence after Beate Zschaepe, the sole surviving member of the gang, gave her first testimony last week, two years after the trial started in Germany's Munich.
Like Zschaepe, Wohlleben denied the charges. He said he did not know the group, which consisted of Zschaepe, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, carried out the murders. Forty-year-old Wohlleben was a former member of a far-right group and was charged with helping the NSU to acquire a gun used in the murder of eight Turks and a Greek national in Germany between 2000 and 2007.
Wohlleben said he did not have the money to buy the weapon he allegedly supplied to the NSU and, echoing Zschaepe's testimony last week, he offered his condolences to the victims.
He said although he had known three members of the NSU since their days together in eastern Germany in the 1990s where they grew up together, he wasn't aware they were involved in any crimes.
The NSU trial was entangled with criticism for not shedding light on German intelligence's relations with the neo-Nazi scene and the NSU and a dispute between Zschaepe and the lawyers she sought to fire. Zschaepe, adamantly silent throughout the hearings, presented her testimony, which was read out by her lawyer Mathias Grabel last week, to the court. In her statement, she claimed she did not participate in the murders and tried to stop the gang after she found out Mundlos and Boehnhardt, who killed themselves shortly before their capture, committed the murders.
The trial will soon enter into its third year and is expected to wrap up in 2016 while a parliamentary inquiry committee continues its work to further investigate the gang, its crimes and connections.
