Police in Germany have uncovered a gang of extremists who were responsible for several murders of foreigners and may have been involved in the wounding of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 2000 bombing at the Dusseldorf train station. The discovery of a murder pistol in the home of a suspected neo-Nazi sparked fears of the existence of a Brown Shirt faction, symbolic of Hitler’s Brown Shirt police who stalked the streets after his ascension to power. The pistol was found in a house rented by “Beate K.,” a 36-year-old woman who blew up her rented apartment to destroy evidence before turning herself in to authorities. Police determined that the pistol was used in the previously unsolved murders of a policewoman and nine foreigner businessmen, eight from Turkey and one from Greece, over a period of six years. The case is not being treated as a one-time affair, and investigators suspect an extreme right terror network may exist in Germany. A second suspect, a 37-year-old German, suspected of having supported the National Socialist Underground, which also may have masterminded several bank robberies. Two other suspects committed suicide last week. "For the first time since reunification, Germany faces large-scale extreme-right extremism," wrote Berlin's Tagesspiegel . The liberal Tageszeitung newspaper told its readers, "Observers are already talking about a possible 'Brown Army Faction' that could be secretly at work Some legislators have urged a ban on the radical National Democratic Party, which parliament member Ralf Stergner called “a political arm of the Nazi scene and enemy of the constitution.”
