German federal prosecutors on Friday said the suspect arrested after the attack on a synagogue and Turkish restaurant in the east-central city of Halle last Wednesday, which left two people dead, has admitted responsibility and said his acts were driven by anti-Semitism and his support for far-right ideology. He has been identified as Stephan Balliet, 27.
The attacker, using firearms and improvised explosive devices, recorded his October 9th rampage on a video camera fixed to his helmet, which bore similarities with the shooting attacks in March this year by a white supremacist on Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people died.
The perpetrator of the Christchurch massacres, 28-year-old Australian national Brenton Tarrant, live-streamed his killings over a period of 17 minutes on Facebook. In the attack this week in Halle, the gunman uploaded his 35-minute video to the online gaming platform Twitch.
The Washington Post, which was given access to the video by the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, reported that in his running commentary, the attacker, who regularly swore and apologised that his shooting spree was hampered by malfunctioning of his homemade weapons, denied the existence of the Holocaust and denounced immigration and feminism, which he blamed for low birthrates, adding that, “The root of all these problems is the Jew”.
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Three documents allegedly written by Balliet were published on the internet. One was a four-page “spiritual guide for angry White men”, calling for the killings of Jews, Muslims, Communists and “traitors”. Another was a document presenting his plans for the attack, and another gave the online address to watch his video on Twitch.
But unlike the 74-page document Tarrant posted online at the time of his attacks in Christchurch, in which he detailed neo-Nazi motivations for his acts, or the documents emailed by Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in a bombing and shooting attack in Norway in July 2012, the documents apparently posted by Balliet contained no ideological detail about his acts, nor his political background.
German interior minister Horst Seehofer warned on Friday of an “elevated” risk of more attacks, which he said could happen “at any moment”.
The Wednesday attacks came just one day after a meeting in Luxembourg of European Union (EU) interior ministers who called for the creation of “a better situational overview of right-wing violent extremism and terrorism” and cooperation to “address the spread of unlawful right-wing extremist content online and offline”, and four months after a German politician was shot dead in what has also been attributed to far-right terrorism.
On June 2nd this year, Walter Lübcke, president of the local government body of the city of Kassel, in central Germany, died in the garden of his home after being shot in the head at close range. Lübcke, 65, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party who had been outspoken in his support for the chancellor’s policies on welcoming migrants into Germany, had been the subject of repeated death threats from far-right groups. The suspect for the shooting, far-right supporter Stephan Ernst, 45, arrested barely two weeks later, had a string of convictions for violent attacks of a racist nature.
In April 2017, a 28-year-old German soldier was arrested for planning a gun attack after assuming, in an elaborate plot, the identity of a Syrian refugee.
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But the threat of far-right terrorist activity, as confirmed by the EU interior ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg last Tuesday, is present across the continent. In November 2018, a court in Birmingham, England, handed an eight-year jail sentence to 34-year-old British Army Lance Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen for his membership of a banned British neo-Nazi terrorist group, National Action. The court heard he was active in attempting to recruit fellow soldiers into the group, and had repeatedly posted vile racial messages in correspondence with fellow extremists, notably against Black people and Jews. Based in Wales, Finnish-born Vehvilainen and fellow White supremacists were reportedly planning to turn disused villages into far-right communities, the court heard.
In February 2018, during campaigning for Italy’s general elections, six African migrants were wounded in drive-by shootings around the main square of the east-central town of Macerata. Luca Traini, 28, with links to the anti-immigrant Northern League party, was arrested immediately after the attacks, giving a fascist salute while draped in the Italian flag. A copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a history of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini were found during a search of his home. He was handed a 12-year jail sentence in October 2018.
On June 16th 2016, just days before the Brexit referendum in Britain, Labour Party MP Jo Cox died from wounds sustained in a shooting and knife attack in the Yorkshire village of Birstall, which was carried out by Thomas Mair, 53, an unemployed gardener. Evidence found at his home and in his online activities demonstrated he had an obsession with Nazism and White supremacy ideology.
At his trial at the Old Bailey in London in November 2016, at the end of which he was given a whole-life jail sentence, the court heard from witnesses that he had shouted “Britain first” and “this is for Britain” as he shot Cox, a 41, twice in the head and once in the chest before stabbing her 15 times. A psychiatrist’s report found no evidence his actions were imputable to poor mental health.
Meanwhile, in June 2018 French justice authorities revealed that a far-right cell suspected of planning racist attacks in the country had been dismantled, in an investigation that had begun the previous year. The group, which called itself Action des Forces Opérationnelles (AFO), had allegedly been preparing attacks on Muslims in revenge for attacks by jihadists in France in recent years, and training in the use of homemade explosives.
In police raids on homes of the members of the group, one was discovered in possession of seven firearms, while another had airsoft arms and a number of books on the Third Reich. Another suspect had built a clandestine explosives laboratory. In the ongoing probe, 13 people, who French media have reported includes former police officers, have been placed under investigation on suspicion of “associating with terrorist criminals”. Last month, press agency AFP, citing sources close to the probe, reported that a member of staff of the French embassy in Salvador, allegedly an active member of the group, had also been placed under investigation.
Following the smashing of the cell, another French clandestine far-right group called “les Barjols” took up a prominent place among the radical French far-right cells. Some of its members receive training in the use of firearms and the encrypting of communications at an agricultural location in the Meuse département (county) in eastern France. One of the group’s cadres was arrested in November 2018, suspected of preparing an attack on French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to eastern France for Armistice commemorations that same month.
In 2018, the number of arrests of far-right activists in EU countries tripled in comparison to 2016, rising from 12 to 44. Last Tuesday’s meeting in Luxembourg of EU interior ministers, under the auspices of the bloc’s Justice and Home Affairs Council, was the first time they had held joint discussions on the issue of far-right violence and terrorism on the continent.
While far-right terrorism is not regarded as a principal threat to the security of member states, the ministers recognised the need for cooperation amid the expansion of the problem and, above all, the need for agreement on a common political drive for common measures to deal with it. In a statement issued at the end of the meeting, the ministers endorsed the creation of “a better situational overview of right-wing violent extremism and terrorism”, the need to “continue to develop and share good practices on how to strengthen the prevention, detection and addressing of violent extremism and terrorism”, to “address the spread of unlawful right-wing extremist content online and offline” and cooperation with “key third countries”.
The meeting considered several reports on the issue, including one by the EU Counter Terrorism Coordinator (a post created in 2007) and a confidential report by Europol, the EU cross-continent police cooperation agency, whose contents were revealed by German media Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR and NDR. The Europol report underlined the large number of arms and bomb-making facilities in the possession of far-right groups. As previously reported by Mediapart, French intelligence reports estimate that around 350 far-right activists in France legally possess one or more firearms.
Police and military personnel on watch list
But among the most disturbing issues raised by the Europol report was that of the recruitment by ultra-right groups of police and military personnel. German broadcaster Deutsche Welle cited a passage from the Europol report in which it warned: "In order to build up their physical abilities and combat skills, members of extremist far-right groups are attempting to win over members from the military and security services in order to learn their expertise in the area of surveillance and combat readiness."
As Mediapart reported in 2018 (see here), several intelligence services in France, and notably the principal domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, submitted the government then with a report similarly warning of the increasing numbers of military and police personnel who were joining far-right groups.
At the time, around 50 staff from the police, gendarmerie and the military were identified on a watch list as having links with violent far-right activists. In comparison, French interior minister Christophe Castaner, speaking after the deadly terrorist attack by a radicalised converted Muslim employee at Paris police headquarters earlier this month, announced that around 20 police and a dozen gendarmerie personnel were on a watch list as suspected converts to Islamic fundamentalism.
French far-right militias operating covertly are actively attempting to recruit police, gendarmerie and military personnel, valued for their technical knowledge of security management but also for their own social networks. One source told Mediapart that in France, law enforcement staff had been asked to access confidential police and gendarmerie data files.
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Les Volontaires pour la France (VPF) is a far-right, self-styled civil defence group which became active after the November 13th 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris by the so-called Islamic State group. On its website, it proclaims that that: “Despite two thousand years of history, despite a strong cementing of its Christian roots and its Greco-Latin culture, it needed just two generations of men to sap its foundations in a quasi-irreversible manner. The French nation now feels condemned to adapt itself to exterior civilisations rather than promoting its identity, which is however admired and praised beyond its frontiers.” In 2016, among its estimated 200 militants across France (the group claimed in 2018 a membership of around 800) about 50 were retired military and police personnel, including a former air force general, Antoine Martinez, and a former army general, once commander of a Foreign legion infantry regiment, Christian Piquemal.
In response to emailed questions submitted to it by Mediapart in 2018, as part of a report into the ultra-right groups active in France, the VPF said it was “in no way a militia” nor was it “affiliated or associated with any political party”. The organisation concluded: “We are realistic and cautious mothers and fathers aware of the dangers and of the utopia of living together with a belligerent Islam, having already experienced them in external theatres of operation (Lebanon, Kosovo...).”
In 2018, another French far-right militant group, called Rémora, and which appears to have now ceased its activities, included among its leadership a retired inspector with the France’s former regional intelligence network, the Renseignements Généraux (RG).
In October 2017, the domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, and the police anti-terrorist branch, the SDAT, dismantled an underground far-right cell with the arrest of a young militant called Logan Nisin and several of his entourage. Suspected of planning attacks on political figures and mosques (report in French, here), members of the group included the son of a serving gendarme, the son of a police officer and a trainee at a French air force school for non-commissioned officers.
In April this year, Mediapart revealed (in French, here) the activities of a now defunct website called Réseau libre (free network) which carried discussions and posts calling for attacks on targets from the Muslim community in France. Many of them expressed a hatred and ideology similar to that of Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian who murdered 51 people and wounded 49 others in his shooting attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March. This included the “replacement theory” promoted by far-right essayist Renaud Camus, according to which the dominance of the white population in France is being gradually undermined and replaced by non-white immigrants, and views of how Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party (the former Front National) was too moderate.
The website published interviews by a man identified only as “Monsieur X” but who was presented as being “a French officer” and a contact from “the anti-terrorist services”. In separate interviews published after terrorist attacks in France, Monsieur X referred to “a war of civilisations”. In an interview in March 2016, he spoke of his views on the options in countering jihadists. “The first, [is to] do everything possible to capture the individuals alive with the hope that they talk, and to bring them to court,” he said. “The second: we identify the threat and proceed with his elimination at an opportune moment. I’ll let you guess which is my preferred option.”
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Monsieur X also advised people to carry arms in case of a terrorist attack. “Be clear to yourself that to carry an unauthorised weapon can land you in jail,” he said, “but not having one can land you in the cemetery.”
Nevertheless, the French domestic intelligence services appear to give a cautious assessment that the recruitment of police and military personnel by radical far-right groups is, for the moment, contained. In one report sent to the government, and seen by Mediapart, it was noted that there had been “a significant fall in the permeability of these individuals to the ideas of small ultra-right groups”, while noting the very existence of it, however, remained “among the priority of concerns with regard to the fight against the radical far-right”.
In May 2016, Patrick Calvar, who was then head of the DGSI, sounded the alarm during his questioning by the national defence and armed forces commission of the National Assembly, the French Parliament’s lower house. “Europe is in great danger,” he told the commission. “Extremisms are on the rise everywhere and we, the domestic services, are in the process of moving resources to interest ourselves in the ultra-right, which is waiting for confrontation […] It is therefore up to us anticipate and to block all these groups which would like, at one time or another, to set off inter-community clashes.”
In another Europol report, ‘Terrorism Situation and Trend’, published on June 27th 2019, the EU police cooperation agency reported on developments among various terrorist movements across the continent, including jihadists, those of the far-left and anarchists, and those of the far-right. Concerning the latter, it noted that: “While the vast majority of right-wing extremist groups across the EU have not resorted to violence, they nevertheless help entrench a climate of fear and animosity against minority groups. Such a climate, built on xenophobia, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and anti-immigration sentiments, may lower the threshold for some radicalised individuals to use violence against persons and property of minority groups.”
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse