Prosecutors demand life behind bars for a man accused of killing two people in an anti-Semitic attack in the German city of Halle last year.
Stephan Balliet, 28, is accused of trying to storm a synagogue filled with worshippers in the attack on October 9, 2019 during Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
After failing to break down the door, the attacker shot dead a female passer-by and a man at a kebab shop instead.
Stephan Balliet (C), who is accused of shooting dead two people after attempting to storm a synagogue in Halle an der Saale, eastern Germany, is escorted to a courtroom at the second day of his trial on July 22, 2020, in Magdeburg, eastern Germany. (Hendrik Schmidt POOL/ AFP)
“The attack on the synagogue in Halle was one of the most repulsive anti-Semitic acts since World War II,” prosecutor Kai Lohse tells a court in Magdeburg.
Lohse says Balliet had acted on the basis of a “racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic ideology” to carry out an attack against not only those he killed but “Jewish life in Germany as a whole.”
The events that unfolded were like a “nightmare”, he adds.
— AFP
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