Mehmet Daimagüler, a lawyer for the victims of the German neo-Nazi gang National Socialist Underground (NSU) received death threats after he took on the case five years ago, German media reported.

A report in Bild said Daimagüler, who represents the family of İsmail Yaşar, the sixth victim of the NSU, was the recipient of online threats. Threatening messages sent via Facebook told Daimagüler to "buy himself a rope," implying he should kill himself, while others are laced with hate speech against the victims of the NSU as well as the lawyers for their families.

The NSU is allegedly responsible for killing 10 people, including eight Turks, as well as bomb attacks in a predominantly Turkish neighborhood in Germany. It is also accused of a string of bank robberies between 2000 and 2007 in racially-motivated crimes. Beate Zschaepe stands trial as the only surviving member of the gang in a trial that started three years ago.

Quoted by Bild, Daimagüler said the hate speech and threats started in 2011 when he joined the victims' legal team. He was among the lawyers who criticized the failure of the authorities to properly investigate the NSU murders, which were initially blamed on domestic disputes in among the Turkish community. The Bild report said Daimagüler did not consider filing criminal complaints against the threats because he believed any investigation would not "bring out anything."

The NSU trial and prosecution of the gang were mired with a series of incidents overshadowing the case, such as the suspicious deaths of key witnesses on the activities of the three-person gang whose two other members apparently killed themselves after the police closed in on them. German authorities were also blamed for not shedding light on the possible connection between the gang and German intelligence, which recruited informants close to the gang from Germany's far-right scene.

The trial will resume later this month after a break since December. In the latest hearings, Zschaepe had broken her silence for the first time since the trial began, and she denied her participation in the killings and other crimes in a written statement.