After suspected neo-Nazi murder, pro-migrant mayors in Germany get death threats

BERLIN — At least three prominent German pro-migrant mayors have received death threats, it emerges today, days after police arrested a suspected far-right extremist over the assassination-style gun murder of a local politician.

Germany has been shocked by news that the top suspect in the June 2 shooting of Kassel city local politician Walter Luebcke is an alleged neo-Nazi, believed to have been angered by an influx of refugees and migrants.

Now several other local politicians, who have been attacked or targeted in the past for welcoming asylum seekers, report that they have again been threatened.

One of them, Cologne mayor Henriette Reker, was stabbed in the neck by a right-wing sympathizer in October 2015 and has been under police protection ever since.

“The mayor has received death threats,” a Cologne police spokesman tells AFP.

Another mayor, Andreas Hollstein, of the small town of Altena in North Rhine-Westphalia state, on Tuesday confirmed to German news agency DPA that he had again received death threats.

He was slashed with a knife in 2017 after accepting a national award from Chancellor Angela Merkel for Altena’s work with refugees.

His attacker had criticized Hollstein for taking in refugees, it emerged during the trial.

Holger Kelch, the mayor of Cottbus, says he had received 500 hate mails and three death threats since 2017 when he called for calm in the city after it emerged the killer of a German pensioner came from Syria.

News of the death threats comes in the wake of the Luebcke case, which prosecutors are treating as a political murder.

— AFP