Members of the extremist right-wing group Freital who committed several bomb attacks against their political opponents and refugees have been sentenced to between four and 10 years in prison by a court in Dresden. Seven men and one woman used fireworks bought in the Czech Republic to prepare the bombs.
The court found eight defendants between the ages of 20 and 40 guilty of creating a terrorist group and attempting murder or abetting that felony. The longest sentences of between 9.5 and 10 years were handed down to Timo S. and Patrick F., who led the group.
The prosecution had sought sentences of between five and 11 years of which the court took significant notice. The defense did not succeed with its request for lower sentences by alleging the group had not intended to kill anybody and was not terrorist because its activity is not comparable, for example with the raids committed by the neo-Nazi group of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which murdered nine men of Greek and Turkish origin between 2000 and 2006 for racial reasons.
Eight members of the radical group Freital, which is named after a town near Dresden, met in 2015 during anti-immigration demonstrations and very quickly moved from protests to violence. The group destroyed a vehicle belonging to a politician from the “Left” Party using explosives, later attacking the office of that party and, in October of that year, using butyric acid against an alternative accommodation facility in Dresden.
During the evenings between 20 September and 1 November 2015 members of the group attacked accommodations for refugees in Freital using explosives. Two people were injured during those attacks.
Prosecutors are convinced that the aim of the group was to create an atmosphere of fear and that it was motivated by an extremist right-wing xenophobic and partially Nazi ideology. The group produced explosives using fireworks imported from the Czech Republic that are not allowed in Germany and that were capable of causing fatal harm, according to the court.
