The trial of the sole surviving member of a neo-Nazi gang accused of killing eight Turks in Germany in the early 2000s, is entangled in a spat between her and her lawyers two years after it opened in Munich. The court in Munich yesterday rejected Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU) member Beate Zschaepe's request for a criminal investigation on her allegations that her court-appointed defense team violated her privacy. Zschaepe claimed Wolfgang Heer, Wolfgang Stahl and Anja Sturm violated lawyer-client privacy in discussions with the presiding judge over whether she would testify. Beate Zschaepe, 40, had not spoken a word during the hearings since the trial started. The court rejected launching a probe, citing that lawyers spoke of nothing that could reveal her guilt or innocence. Three lawyers had sought the court's permission in a hearing 10 days ago to step down as lawyers for Zschaepe but the judge rejected it. If accepted, their resignation would hinder the lengthy legal process. Earlier this month, Mathias Grasel, a new lawyer, was added to the defense team. Grasel has asked the court to suspend the hearings for three weeks so that he can thoroughly examine the proceedings, leading to the cancelation of several hearings. The court in Munich has had 219 hearings since the trial first started on May 6, 2013.Zschaepe was arrested while Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt were found dead in 2011 in an apparent suicide following a bank robbery. The three-member gang is accused of murdering 10 people, including eight Turkish-Germans, a Greek migrant as well as a German policewoman from 2000 to 2007. The gang is thought to be supported by larger neo-Nazi groups and deliberately ignored by German intelligence aware of its wrongdoings.Four other suspects accused of aiding and abetting the NSU are also standing trial.The trial was both a revelation and a supposed cover-up for many, as it shed light on how misguided German authorities were in wrongly tracing the killing to a mafia feud while failing to dig deeper into the connections of the NSU with the intelligence services. German intelligence services are blamed for deliberately turning a blind eye to the existence of the gang for over a decade even though it reportedly had informants all across the neo-Nazi scene in Germany, which flourished in the 1990s.