Already entangled in a string of questionable coincidences, the case of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) gang accused of racist murders of Turks in Germany revealed another "coincidence." Graffiti reading "NSU" on the wall at the crime scene where Michele Kleisewetter, a policewoman, was killed by the gang in 2007, was apparently not drawn by gang members, authorities announced. The Federal Chief Prosecutor's Office said in a statement that the graffiti was not the work of the gang, which "always operated underground." NSU was a three-member gang that killed 10 people including eight Turks and a Greek between 2000 and 2007.
Kiesewetter was their last victim and the group's two members Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt killed themselves when the police closed in on them following a foiled bank robbery in 2011.
A film crew making a documentary about Kiesewetter stumbled upon the graffiti while scanning video footage taken immediately after the policewoman's death.
Authorities declined to comment on who might have been behind the graffiti.
Kiesewetter was shot dead while on a patrol in Germany's Heilbronn while a fellow police officer was heavily injured.
Wolfgang Drexler, chairman of parliamentary committee investigating the NSU told the DPA news agency that they were investigating the graffiti case.
Blunders on the part of authorities investigating the NSU or "coincidences" leading to destruction of critical evidence had been piling up in the case since the gang's existence was made public in 2011.
Beate Zschaepe, the only surviving member of the gang, is being prosecuted in a lengthy trial that began in 2013.
Recently, German media outlets reported that a number of text messages sent and received by a man linked to the gang "disappeared" in the latest embarrassment for Germany, where critical evidence in the case was "swept away by floods" or "accidentally deleted" in previous instances.
The NSU is accused of murdering eight Turks, carrying out a string of bank robberies and a bomb attack targeting a predominantly Turkish neighborhood in Germany.
Its three members managed to dodge the authorities for years before being discovered in 2011, apparently by pure chance as police stumbled upon a video where they boasted about their crimes.
German public broadcaster MDR has reported that the issue of missing text messages was discovered by a parliamentary committee investigating the gang.
More than one hundred text messages dating back to 1998 were sent by and to Jan Werner, a suspect linked to the gang.
It was the same Werner whose notebooks with suspicious content were allegedly destroyed in 2014 by Berlin police who were subject to a 2012 investigation.
Werner is accused of supplying arms to the gang in 1998 and was an eyewitness in the 2014 hearings on the gang, whose sole surviving member, Zschaepe, is standing trial.
It is unclear why the text messages went missing, but it raises questions about the authorities' repeated pledges to shed light on the negligence of security agencies regarding the case.
Critics of the case claim police and intelligence services that hired people from the neo-Nazi scene as informants tried to erase their tracks leading to the NSU case.
Despite its links to many gangs in Germany's neo-Nazi scene, the NSU apparently went unnoticed for years, from the late 1990s to 2011.
Authorities initially blamed domestic disputes in the Turkish community for the murders and other crimes between 2000 and 2007.
German media has even dubbed the murders the "Döner killings" in reference to the popular Turkish dish.
The MDR report says police intercepted some 2,500 text messages but 114 messages over two days in August 1998 remain missing.
The German interior ministry of Thuringia where Werner was wiretapped has said the disappearance of the text messages is related to "a technical problem," MDR reported.
German media outlets say Werner had contacted an intelligence official one day before sending the 114 messages.
Last year, it was revealed that several documents regarding the case disappeared in the 2010 Saxony floods.
The document was related to Ralf Marschner, a neo-Nazi figure code named "Primus" by German intelligence, which hired him as an informant.
Quoted by German media outlets, Irene Mihalic, a lawmaker in the parliamentary inquiry committee on the NSU, said the prosecutor's office in Chemnitz investigating the case told the committee that documents regarding Marschner went missing in a flood disaster, and added that it was "odd that the raging waters picked up these particular documents to carry away."
Ralf Marschner disappeared in 2007 though media reports say he settled in Switzerland after he faced an arrest warrant regarding the NSU case.
Turkey has been closely monitoring the trial and investigation and blames German authorities for failure to shed light on the case and prolonging the trial.
In statements to reporters in March, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu questioned "disappearing" witnesses.
"Perpetrators of NSU's crimes are known and it was apparent that they were supported," he said, referring to links between people related to gang and German intelligence services.