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| Pictures of people killed by the NSU are held up, in 2013, besides a memorial to cafe owner Halit Yozgat who was murdered in Kassel in 2006. |
Nearly five years into the trial of a German neo-Nazi gang who went on a killing spree against immigrants, relatives of the victims have become so frustrated with the police’s inability to untangle the case they have turned to a an unlikely profession in search of clues: architects.
Forensic Architecture, a London-based organisation started by architect Eyal Weizman have previously investigated war crimes in Syria, Palestine and the former Yugoslavia, using modern technology to search urban areas for evidence.
“If a pile of rubble is what’s left of your crime scene an architect may be better qualified to analyse it than [the police],” Weizman said.
For the 11th anniversary of the death of the ninth and final victim of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground attackers, Weizman’s researchers have turned their attention to the case of a western European state allegedly colluding in a brutal crime.
On 6 April 2006, Halit Yozgat, 21, of Turkish origins, was shot at close range inside an internet cafe he managed in the city of Kassel. During the trial of the surviving members of the NSU it emerged that an intelligence agent employed by the central German state of Hesse had been inside the cafe while the murder took place – and neglected to report the incident.
When called as a witness for the trial in 2013, the agent, Andreas Temme, claimed he had neither heard the two shots, smelled the gunpowder, nor seen Yozgot’s lifeless body behind the till as he left the cafe. Temme told German public television that he had been simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.
In spite of protests by the victim’s family, the presiding judge, Manfred Götzl, has so far ruled out investigating the role played by Germany’s intelligence agencies in the NSU’s extremist activities.
After being approached in November 2016 by a citizens’ initiative aimed at solving some of the questions hanging over the NSU trial of the surviving gang member, Beate Zschäpe, and four alleged accomplices, Forensic Architecture on Thursday presented evidence that they hoped could alter the judiciary’s mind.
Last month, a team of Israeli, Greek and Syrian architects built a model of the crime scene inside the House of World Cultures arts centre in Berlin. Using a leaked police video of Temme re-enacting the scene, as well as witness statements from four other people in the internet cafe at the time, the group carried out three “sensory tests” to determine whether the agent would have seen, heard or smelt evidence of the crime.
A video of Temme’s field of vision, recorded with a Go-Pro camera fixed to the head of an actor, showed that Yozgat’s body would have been visible to the 1.90-metre tall man as he paused to place his payment on the blood splattered counter.
Playing back a recording of a gun-shot fired from a Česká CZ 83 pistol with a silencer, Weizman’s team showed that even in the adjacent room the shot still would have been audible at 86 decibels, the “equivalent noise of a freight train at 15 metres away”.
Forensic Architecture will present their findings, on 10 May, at the Munich higher municipal court where the trial is being held.
But if, in its previous projects in the Middle East, Forensic Architecture worked to fuse multiple witness statements into one complete account of events, its first German case concentrates on disproving a statement by an agent whose version of events has already been dismissed in court by one police officer as “incomprehensible”.
The real reason as to what Temme was doing at the crime scene at the time of the shooting remains unanswered by the architecture detectives. Had he been following a lead suggesting that an attack was planed at the location but simply failed to foil the murder?
“One hypothesis that presents itself is that Temme had started researching a case on his own accord without permission from his superiors,” said Hermann Schaus, aLeft party MP, who is part of an investigative committee examining the NSU scandal.
What if Temme carried out the murder himself?
At the least, Forensic Architecture’s project may force the German judiciary to ask such questions, said Christina Farvia, the group’s research coordinator. “We are targeting our viewing lens not at the killer, but at a system that decided to accept a very strange and vague account of what happened.”
Weizman said: “In forensics, there a lot of work that goes into solidifying evidence. We close the gaps between what is probable and provable. If we can reduce the doubts around what happened in this specific case, then hopefully it will increase the pressure on the court to ask even bigger questions.”
At a remembrance rally in Kassel, on Thursday, the victim’s father, Ismail Yozgat, said he would not accept the final ruling in the trial without the investigation being widened to cast light on the role the intelligence agencies allegedly might have had in the murder. “Let me repeat,” he said. “The government’s intelligence agent either killed my son, or he saw the murderers.”
guardian
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