Interior ministry admits number of victims of far-right crimes may be far higher than reported

Police are to reinvestigate 746 cases of killings or attempted killings between 1990 and 2011 after the interior ministry admitted the number of victims of far-right crimes in Germany may be considerably higher than previously reported.

A spokesman for the ministry on Wednesday confirmed it would reinvestigate the cases, which total 849 victims, for evidence that they may have been committed by far-right extremists.

The official figure for victims of crimes with a far-right motive for the same period is currently 63, though several reports question that number. A joint research project by the newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Zeit puts the figure at 152; an exhibition currently touring Germany lists 169 victims.

Marcus Reinert, managing director of the charity Opferperspektive, told the Guardian: "I am in no doubt the real number is considerably higher than the official figure."

The latest measure is part of a wider attempt to look at the way German authorities deal with far-right crimes in the wake of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) scandal. In 2011, it emerged that the far-right terror group had managed to evade the police for 13 years, during which it was allegedly responsible for the killing of nine immigrants and one policewoman.

Some lawyers claim that part of the reason why the NSU was able to go unnoticed for so long is that Germany has only been recording politically motivated crimes – roughly the equivalent of hate crime in Britain – since 2001, and that too many local police authorities still have an inadequate understanding of the category.

In principle, political crimes should include those against ethnic and religious minorities as well as acts of violence towards the disabled or homeless.

Unlike in Britain, police in Germany do not have to rule out the possibility of a far-right motive when investigating hate crimes. In the NSU case, police had long assumed that the killings had been the result of feuds between Turkish gangs.