BERLIN (AP) - Lawyers for the main defendant in a high-profile neo-Nazi murder trial in Germany have begun their closing arguments - five years after proceedings opened.

Beate Zschaepe, the only known survivor of the far-right National Socialist Underground group, is accused of taking part in 10 killings, two bomb attacks and several bank robberies.

The 43-year-old's lawyers told the Munich regional court Tuesday that their client didn't have an equal role in the killings committed by two deceased members of the group.

In this Tuesday, March 13, 2018 photo terror suspect Beate Zschaepe, center, arrives in a court room between her lawyers Hermann Borchert, left, and Mathias Grasel, right, in Munich, Germany. The lawyers for the main defendant in a high-profile neo-Nazi murder trial have begun their closing arguments, five years after proceedings opened. Beate Zschaepe, the only known survivor of the far-right National Socialist Underground group, is accused of taking part 10 killings, two bomb attacks and several bank robberies. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, Pool)

Prosecutors want life imprisonment for Zschaepe and lesser sentences for four defendants accused of helping the group. They, and lawyers representing some of the victims, finished their closing arguments in February.

The trial, which was drawn out by regular delaying motions by the defendants, is expected to conclude within weeks.

In this Tuesday, March 13, 2018 photo terror suspect Beate Zschaepe, center, sits in a court room between her lawyers Hermann Borchert, left, and Mathias Grasel, right, in Munich, Germany. The lawyers for the main defendant in a high-profile neo-Nazi murder trial have begun their closing arguments, five years after proceedings opened. Beate Zschaepe, the only known survivor of the far-right National Socialist Underground group, is accused of taking part 10 killings, two bomb attacks and several bank robberies. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, Pool) </s> A Munich court has found the main defendant in a high-profile neo-Nazi trial guilty of murder over the killing of 10 people — most of them migrants.

The victims were gunned down between 2000 and 2007 in a case that shocked Germany.

Judges have sentenced Beate Zschaepe to life in prison.

The 43-year-old was arrested in 2011, shortly after her two accomplices were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.

Together with the men, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, she had formed the National Socialist Underground, which pursued an ideology of white racial supremacy by targeting migrants, mostly of Turkish origin.

Authorities for years failed to attribute the killings and two bomb attacks to a far-right group, instead investigating non-existent gangland links. </s> Defense lawyers asked a court in Munich on Thursday to give Beate Zschäpe a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for her involvement in the National Socialist Underground (NSU) terrorist cell.

State attorneys had demanded a life sentence for Zschäpe, who they say helped mastermind and carry out a string of murders and bomb attacks between 2000 and 2007.

Read more: What is Germany's NSU terror trial?

The facts of the case:
• Zschäpe is the only surviving member of the NSU, which also included Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos. Both men committed suicide after authorities identified the group in 2011.
• The NSU allegedly murdered nine people with immigrant backgrounds and a police officer. They have also been accused of committing two bomb attacks and a series of bank robberies.
• Zschäpe has been charged with joint complicity in 10 counts of murder, arson, multiple robberies, extortion, the formation of a terrorist organization and membership in a terrorist organization.
• Federal prosecutors have said Zschäpe should serve a maximum life-in-prison sentence.
• But her lawyer, Mathias Grasel, said on Thursday that she was guilty of arson, extortion, aiding multiple robberies, and conspiracy to commit robberies, but that there was no evidence for her the other charges. Her sentence, they said, should not exceed 10 years in prison.

"These crimes [the murders] were committed solely by Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos," adding: "my client cannot be made responsible for the acts of the two men as the only survivor [of the group]."

"The legal system must be able to deal with crimes for which the actual perpetrators can no longer be held accountable."

Who is Beate Zschäpe? Zschäpe is a 43-year-old from Jena in eastern Germany, where she, Böhnhardt and Mundlos had been active in the right-wing extremist scene. She has been in pretrial detention since 2011.

Mammoth trial: The trial against Zschäpe started in 2013 in Munich's Higher Regional Court.

What happens next? The court is set in the next few weeks to hear pleas from Zschäpe's previous lawyers, who she had thrown out, and four people accused of helping the NSU. A final ruling is expected sometime after June. </s> A German court on Wednesday sentenced neo-Nazi gang member Beate Zschäpe to life in prison for the murder of 10 people, mostly with an immigrant background.

Zschäpe is the sole surviving member of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a small far-right terror cell found responsible for the murder of nine immigrant men (eight Turkish and one Greek) and a German policewoman, in a killing spree carried out over seven years from 2000.

The group also set off two bombs in Cologne in 2000 and in 2004, with the second bombing injuring more than 20 people.

German police discovered the NSU almost by chance in 2011, after they had operated undetected for more than a decade, financing themselves with bank robberies. While some German law enforcement agencies had been on their trail, none had joined the dots and the cell was only discovered after Zschäpe’s two partners killed themselves following a failed robbery.

The events led to harsh criticism of Germany’s decentralized security structure, blamed for failing to detect the gang’s activities sooner.

Zschäpe, who is now 43, was put on trial in 2013 for complicity in all 10 murders, the Cologne bombings, 15 bank raids, arson and attempted murder, as well as for being part of a terrorist organization. In an apology issued in 2015, she assumed responsbility for the arson attacks but denied involvement in the murders. However, in her apology she said that she felt “morally responsible” for her actions, as well as for failing to stop her partners’ suicides.

“What the perpetrators have done is irreparable. The victims will never be forgotten,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Twitter, adding that the fight against racist violence and intolerance requires not only the rule of law but also the “diversity of our open societies.”

Zschäpe’s lawyer Mathias Grasel said he would seek to appeal the verdict, arguing that Zschäpe could not be condemned for the complicity in the killings committed by her two partners, and calling the ruling “legally untenable.” The verdict, delivered by Munich’s Higher Regional Court, must now be reviewed by a federal court.

Read this next: Will Trump make NATO obsolete? </s> One of Germany's most high-profile neo-Nazi trials came to an end Wednesday when so-called "Nazi bride" Beate Zschaepe was found guilty of 10 counts of murder, NBC News reported.

She is the last surviving member of a neo-Nazi gang, the National Socialist Underground, that carried out a series of killings and bombings between 2000 and 2007.

The gang killed eight men of Turkish origin, a Greek migrant and a female German police officer.

Zschaepe spoke only twice during the five-year case, but did deny taking part in killings while also apologizing to the victims' families. </s> A German court has found the main defendant in a high-profile neo-Nazi trial guilty of killing 10 people – most of them migrants – who were gunned down between 2000 and 2007 in a case that has shocked Germany and prompted accusations of institutional racism in the country’s security agencies.

The judges sentenced Beate Zschäpe to life in prison for murder, membership of a terrorist organisation, bomb attacks that injured dozens, and several lesser crimes including a string of robberies. Four men were found guilty of supporting the group in various ways and sentenced to prison terms of between two and a half to 10 years.

The presiding judge, Manfred Götzl, told a packed Munich courtroom that Zschäpe’s guilt weighed particularly heavily, meaning she is likely to serve at least a 15-year sentence.

The 43-year-old showed no emotion as Götzl read out her sentence. A number of far-right activists attending the trial clapped when one of the co-accused, André Eminger, received a lower sentence than expected.

Zschäpe was arrested in 2011, shortly after her two accomplices, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. Together with the two men she had formed the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a group that pursued an ideology of white racial supremacy by targeting migrants, mostly of Turkish origin.

The NSU evaded arrest for almost 14 years, thanks to a network of supporters and repeated mistakes by German security agencies.

Anti-migrant sentiment that underpinned the group’s ideology was particularly strong in eastern Germany during the early 1990s, when Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe were in their late teens and early 20s. The period saw a string of attacks against migrants and the rise of far-right parties.

Anti-racism campaigners have drawn parallels between that period and the violence directed toward asylum-seekers in Germany in recent years, which has seen the emergence of the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

The case against Zschäpe hinged heavily on the question of whether judges would hold her equally culpable for the killings as her two dead accomplices, even though there was no evidence she had been physically present during the attacks.

Her lawyers sought to portray Zschäpe as a naive woman who played no active role in the killings, bomb attacks and bank robberies committed by Mundlos and Böhnhardt. Zschäpe rarely spoke during the five-year trial, refusing to answer questions from lawyers representing the victims’ families. Toward the end, she expressed regret for the families’ loss and described herself as “morally guilty” but urged the court not to convict her “for something that I neither wanted nor did”.

The NSU case has already become a firm part of German popular culture, serving as the basis for books, a Golden Globe-winning film, and a Netflix series NSU German History X.

Still, Barbara John, the government’s ombudswoman for the victims’ families, said many in Germany don’t want to know the details of the case. “That’s true, too, for immigrants who want to protect themselves psychologically from the knowledge that they live in a country which couldn’t protect them,” she told the Associated Press.

Speaking ahead of the verdict, John said the trial could help send a signal not just to far-right extremists but also to the country’s security agencies, which for years failed to consider a possible far-right motive in the 10 killings and two bomb attacks that took place across the country. Instead, police focused on whether the victims had ties to organised crime a line of investigation for which there was never any evidence.

Families of the victims said on Tuesday that the suspicion directed toward their loved-ones shook their faith in the German justice system. “The investigation went in the wrong direction, not due to the failure of individuals but due to institutional racism,” said Alexander Hoffmann, a lawyer representing victims of a 2004 bomb attack in Cologne.

He urged federal prosecutors to continue investigating the NSU’s wider network of supporters, believed to be much broader than the four men on trial with Zschäpe.

John said there are encouraging signs that police and intelligence agencies are beginning to listen to minorities and make an effort to recruit them, ending the long-maintained illusion that Germany isn’t a country of immigrants.

“One big question remains: do we in Germany really want to know why and how the NSU murders occurred?” John said. “If that were the case, the work of politicians and civil society needs to continue.” </s> Five years after Zschäpe, 43, first entered the dock, her lawyer Hermann Borchert called the case against her "inadequate" and insisted she was not involved in a string of racist murders, bombings and bank robberies committed by the clandestine cell.

Prosecutors accused Zschäpe of complicity in the bloody crimes carried out by Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, the two gunmen of the self-styled National Socialist Underground (NSU) who died in an apparent 2011 murder-suicide.

Borchert placed the sole blame on the two men, who had been in a love triangle with Zschäpe since their teenage years and who between 2000 and 2007 shot dead eight men with Turkish roots, a Greek migrant and a German policewoman.

Zschäpe, who faces a maximum term of life in jail, has claimed she was an unwilling and horrified bystander to the crimes, not a strong-willed and active participant as charged by prosecutors in the Munich trial.

Borchert told the court that the two men had been the NSU's dominant force and that the particularly volatile Boehnhardt had been described by his own father as "a ticking timebomb".

The lawyer said it was "absurd to believe that the two Uwes cowered before my client", given that they were cold-blooded enough "to simply shoot people in the face".

Macabre video

The NSU case deeply shocked Germany, where security services had previously only associated terrorism with far-left and Islamist militants and believed far-right thugs mainly committed random acts of street violence and arson.

It was only after the two men's deaths in 2011 that Germany awoke to the news that the killings, long blamed on migrant crime gangs and dubbed the "doner (kebab) murders" by police and media, were in fact committed by organised fascists.

Also in the dock are four men accused of having supported the NSU with weapons, identity papers, cash or other support during their string of 10 murders, two bombings and 15 bank robberies that helped finance their underground lives.

MUST READ: The German spy services' dubious ties to the neo-Nazi scene

Zschäpe, when she learnt of the two Uwes' deaths after a bungled bank heist, torched their common home, dropped her two cats with a neighbour and fled.

While on the run, she mailed to media and Muslim community groups DVDs in which the NSU bragged about the murders in a macabre confession video set to a Pink Panther cartoon theme.

The NSU's discovery embarrassed German security services, exposing institutional biases and mistakes and raising uncomfortable questions about how the cell went undetected for 13 years.

Federal and state-level parliamentary committees spent years trying to understand what went wrong, including the murky role of paid undercover informants inside the rightwing extremist subculture.

In the Munich trial, prosecutors have focused on Zschäpe, charging she was an active NSU member who aided the crimes by covering the men's tracks, handling finances and providing a safe retreat.

Zschäpe has insisted that she was involved "neither in the planning nor the execution" and had only stayed with the two men because was financially and emotionally dependent on them and feared going to jail.

Describing their shared teenage days in the neo-Nazi youth scene of their post-reunification east German home town of Jena, she told the court that "those two were my family". </s> A German court has found a member of a neo-Nazi group guilty of 10 murders after a five-year trial and has sentenced her to life in prison. Nine of the victims were immigrants, and the prosecution said the killings were racially motivated.

Beate Zschaepe, 43, was the main defendant on trial for the murders and the last surviving member of a terrorist cell called the National Socialist Underground. Zschaepe had shared a flat with the two other members of the cell, who died in 2011 in an apparent suicide pact.

Police found the bodies of Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt in a burned-out van after an attempted bank robbery. The BBC reported that a fire at their home was "apparently an attempt to destroy evidence" and led to Zschaepe turning herself in.

The three, over several years, waged a neo-Nazi campaign, which included two bombings in Cologne, bank robberies and the murders of eight ethnic Turks, a Greek citizen and a German police officer. Most of the victims were fatally shot with a handgun while they were at work. Zschaepe denied taking part in the murders, which occurred between 2000 and 2007, but said she should have done more to stop them from happening.

Zschaepe's defense lawyer, Mathias Grasel, told The Guardian he would appeal her conviction. "Instead of punishing Zschaepe as a representative, a constitutional democracy has to be able to bear it when the true culprits can no longer be prosecuted for their cruel crimes," Grasel said.

The Guardian reported, "The sentence was largely as a result of the state prosecutor's opinion that even though the court could not prove Zschaepe had been present at any of the crime scenes, she 'had been aware of, contributed to, and in her own way co-piloted' the neo-Nazi cell's killings." The judge found the killings had racist motives and were designed to spread fear and insecurity among immigrant communities.

Four other men were convicted on Tuesday for helping the NSU cell and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 2 1/2 to 10 years.

Dirk Laabs, co-author of a book about the NSU, told The Guardian, "If you look at the sentences for Zschaepe's co-conspirators, this is an unbelievably soft verdict. It's hard to imagine people accused of supplying weapons and logistics for terrorist activity would have got off so lightly if this had been a trial about an Islamist cell."

Critics said a central question was unanswered: How did the NSU terrorist cell evade detection from German authorities for so many years? At the time of the killings, police blamed German-Turkish gang violence. According to the BBC, German media referred to them as the "Bosphorus murders," or the more derogatory "doner murders." Doner is a name for a Turkish kebab.

In 2013, NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reported that many "among the 3 million people of Turkish descent who live in Germany are angry, saying the murders and aftermath highlight prevalent racism not just in society but in the government. They want to know why German authorities failed to uncover — let alone stop — the terror campaign against them."

The Telegraph reported that evidence emerged during the trials "that several intelligence informants were in contact with the group, and an intelligence officer was close to the scene of one of the killings." According to The Guardian, "Many experts question how the trio could have gone undetected for so long without a sizable support network across Germany." </s> A court in Germany has sentenced a Syrian man to nine and a half years in jail over a fatal stabbing that sparked far-right riots in the eastern city of Chemnitz.

Judges on Thursday convicted asylum seeker Alaa Sheikhi of manslaughter and dangerous bodily harm in the killing of a German national in August 2018.

Defence lawyers appealed the verdict. They said there was no evidence the 24-year-old defendant had helped stab Hillig and suggested the court had been swayed by the political debate in the high-profile case.

But chief justice Simone Herberger said she saw "no doubt about his guilt".

The verdict comes barely a week before elections in the two eastern states of Saxony and Brandenburg, in which the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is expected to make big gains.

The trial took place in Dresden, the capital of Saxony, rather than Chemnitz, for security reasons and because of what the court called the "extraordinarily high public interest".

The court heard that a fugitive Iraqi, a 22-year-old identified only as Farhad A, was the first to confront 35-year-old Daniel Hillig in the early hours of August 26 last year. He and Sheikhi then stabbed Hillig, a carpenter with German-Cuban roots. The victim died of internal injuries.

Sheikhi, who arrived in Germany during the 2015 refugee influx to Europe, was arrested hours after the attack, together with another Iraqi who was later released for lack of evidence.

The main suspect in the case is still being sought on an international arrest warrant.

Sheikhi, who denies the charges against him, remained silent throughout much of the trial. He spoke only on the last day to say he hoped "the truth is brought to light and a fair verdict is given".

Ricarda Lang, a defence lawyer, argued the case against Sheikhi was based only on questionable, late-night witness testimony rather than fingerprints, DNA or other forensic evidence.

Lang also asserted, shortly before the verdict, that the court was "not unaffected by the political situation in Chemnitz" and may convict the defendant because "someone needs to take the blame so that Chemnitz stays quiet".

Following the killing, thousands of neo-Nazis, members of AfD, and football hooligans assembled in Chemnitz to protest against migration.

In some cases, the mobs randomly attacked people of foreign appearance and, in follow-up mass rallies, fascist activists openly performed the illegal Hitler salute.

Local Jewish, Turkish and Iranian restaurants at the time became targets of xenophobic vandalism.

The violence also spurred counterdemonstrations by supporters of immigration in Chemnitz.

The AfD welcomed the verdict against Sheikhi. In a post on Facebook, it said it hoped the Iraqi suspect would be found soon and added that Chemnitz had been unfairly "branded as a playground for right-wing radicals".

Opinion polls show that the AfD could become the biggest party in Saxony and Brandenburg in the September 1 elections.
The terror trial of Beate Zschäpe hears closing arguments in Germany. In addition to a series of murders, Zschäpe stands accused of bombings and bank robberies.