This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

German police have arrested six men on suspicion of belonging to a far-right terrorist group that attacked foreigners in the city of Chemnitz.

The German nationals, aged 20 to 31, were taken into custody for allegedly forming a group called Revolution Chemnitz with the aim of subverting the democratic state. “To this end, they intended to launch violent and armed attacks against foreigners and people who have different political views,” said federal prosecutors in a statement.

Their targets included representatives of different political parties and members of the economic establishment, the prosecutors said. They added that the group appeared to have been planning an assault on Germany’s Unity Day, which falls on Wednesday.

“They wanted to change the country,” investigators told Munich-based daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Citing intercepted chats and telephone calls, SZ reported that the men “wanted to achieve more than the National Socialist Underground” or NSU, a neo-Nazi extremist group uncovered in 2011 that murdered 10 people and planted three bombs.

As well as politicians, the group wanted to attack journalists, whom they referred to as “the media dictatorship and its slaves”, the newspaper said.

The arrests again cast an uncomfortable spotlight on extremism in Saxony state, where Chemnitz is located and which is a stronghold of the far-right party AfD.

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Investigators are still trying to determine if the suspects were involved in the wave of xenophobic marches that swept through Chemnitz at the end of August after a fatal stabbing, allegedly by an asylum seeker.

But prosecutors said that on 14 September five of the suspects “armed with glass bottles, weighted knuckle gloves, and an electroshock appliance, attacked and hurt several foreign residents” in Chemnitz.

“Investigations show that the assault was a test-run for an event that one of the accused planned for 3 October 2018,” said prosecutors.

Police are still investigating what exactly was being plotted. More than 100 police officers were deployed to search apartments and other premises.

“With the arrests and raids, we are sending a clear signal that we are identifying and breaking up such rightwing terrorist structures early,” said the Saxony interior minister, Roland Wöller.

Katarina Barley, the justice minister, highlighted the suspects’ links to the football hooligan, skinhead and neo-Nazi scenes and said “the network under investigation does not stand in isolation”.

At least one of the men, Tom W, was convicted 10 years ago for his role as a leader of a violent 50-strong far-right group known as Sturm 34 which was ultimately banned, SZ reported.

Saxony, a former communist state, has gained notoriety as the home of several extremist groups.

Eight members of a far-right outfit called the Freital group were jailed in March on terrorism and attempted murder charges for a series of explosions targeting refugees and anti-fascist activists.

Members of the NSU, responsible for several racist killings, also evaded police for years in Chemnitz and another Saxony town, Zwickau.

Most recently, Chemnitz has been polarised over the question of migrants since Daniel Hille was stabbed to death on 26 August. Police investigating the murder have detained a Syrian man, Alaa S, 23, while an international warrant has been issued for an Iraqi.

After the stabbing, thousands of people took to the streets in protest, answering calls by far-right party AfD and nationalist group Pegida, which campaigns against what it calls “the Islamisation of the west”.

Police found themselves overwhelmed by the swift mobilisation of the region’s football hooligans and rightwing extremists, with the demonstrations degenerating into mob violence against foreigners.

August’s week of xenophobic protests in Chemnitz deeply shocked Germany, prompting Angela Merkel to urge people to stand up against the far right. The chancellor will visit Chemnitz in November, but she is likely to face a cold reception. Resentment runs deep in the city over her liberal refugee policy under which more than a million asylum seekers have arrived in Germany since 2015.