The only surviving member of the Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU) gang, implicated in the murders of eight Turks, a Greek person and a German, broke her silence in a breakthrough in the prolonged trial of the gang Thursday. Adopting a somber tone after entering a Munich courtroom with a big grin on her face, Zschaepe admitted she once harbored the nationalist ideology.The move comes three years after the controversial trial began. The 41-year-old woman kept her silence throughout the trial since 2013 and only issued a short statement in December when she portrayed herself as someone who merely fell in with the gang, claiming she was only a bystander to the crimes ranging from racist murders to a bomb attack and a string of bank robberies.Zschaepe said she no longer judges people by their origin and political views and expressed her regrets. She also condemned "what Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt did to the victims," in reference to two other members of the gang who died in a murder-suicide in 2011.The trial, expected to be wrapped up later this year, was mired with controversies from the start and it is not known whether Zschaepe's confession will bring a reduction in her sentence. Prosecutors accuse her of aiding the crimes, handling financial affairs of the NSU and harboring Mundlos and Boehnhardt.The NSU case is entangled in a string of incidents that has led the families of the victims to doubt that the gang's activities were properly investigated, and to suspect that German intelligence had knowledge of the NSU's crimes, thanks to its informants in Germany's neo-Nazi underground. Eight Turks, a Greek national and a German policewoman were among the victims of the gang, which is also responsible for a bomb attack in a Turkish neighborhood in Germany, along with several bank robberies between 2000 and 2006. The gang's racist crimes were only revealed in 2011, after the discovery of evidence on motives of the gang in a NSU hideout. Police initially portrayed the murders of the Turks as domestic disputes in the Turkish-German community that led to the notorious nickname the "döner killings," which was once popular in the German media.In her first written statement, Beate Zschaepe has claimed she was not involved in the crimes and was shocked to discover what Mundlos and Boehnhardt did, though she acknowledged that she shied away from reporting the crimes to police after she learned about them. If the court charges her with the murders and other crimes, she faces a life sentence in prison, but Zschaepe says she was only involved in the arson of the home where Boehnhardt and Mundlos died and for distributing a video where the gang members speak about their crimes.The NSU gang and the trial highlighted the neo-Nazi scene, which intensified attacks on Turks in the 1990s, and was still powerful and under the protection of authorities, as evidence linking some far-rightists to the gang was revealed to be destroyed by intelligence services that often recruit members of the scene as informants.Most recently, lawyers for the families of İsmail Yaşar and Enver Şimşek, who were killed by the NSU, filed complaints against prosecutors in Karlsruhe and officers of the Berlin law enforcement agency Landeskriminalamt for destroying potential evidence linking the NSU to other far-right groups. That case stems from a 2014 incident where notebooks belonging to Jan Werner, a suspect with links to the gang, were destroyed. It came to light after a former judge assigned to investigate the case by a parliamentary committee inquiring about the NSU trial asked authorities to return the possessions of Werner, who was 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.Along with destruction of evidence, the case raised more questions than answers when several witnesses, either former members of neo-Nazi groups or friends of group members, died during the trial in suspicious situations.