Press release on the investigation against Lina E .: Criminal charges against investigators, request for an actual full inspection of the files

Translated from German

We defend Lina E., who was arrested on November 5th, 2020 on the basis of an arrest warrant from the investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice and has been in custody since then.

Our client has been under investigation for some time on charges of having been involved in two attacks on a bar known as a neo-Nazi meeting place and its operator. An earlier arrest warrant against her was suspended after a few days, and she met the reporting requirements without any objection. The renewed arrest and imprisonment of our client is based on the fact that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office has taken the preliminary investigation and now accuses Lina E. of being part of a “criminal organization” which has also carried out further attacks on neo-Nazis.

We know that $ 129 StGB proceedings have always served the investigative authorities as a welcome opportunity to investigate the left-wing scene. We therefore know that we will have to fight hard to get a fair trial for our client.

We do not know whether it is a coincidence that the publicly effective arrest of Lina E. took place exactly on the day on which the district court of Hamburg pronounced its verdict against the “Drei von der Parkbank” and followed the central assumptions of the indictment. We know, however, that investigations according to $ 129 StGB are often used to conjure up the specter of well-organized “left-wing extremist violent offenders”.

And we know that many of these procedures in the past have not produced the results that the authorities would have wished for. Extensive results from surveillance measures that intrude deeply into the privacy of the accused, right up to days of observation and surveillance of conversations in private cars, have also flowed into the files of this investigation. Nevertheless, the “evidence” that our client is supposed to bring in connection with further attacks on neo-Nazis is extremely thin, so a casual mention of a car model or the alleged involvement of a woman must suffice to substantiate the suspicion.

From our point of view, it is no coincidence that the investigative authorities are now very active and far beyond the limits of what is permitted: we have learned from newspaper articles that investigators – very likely from the LKA Saxony – have punctured file contents to the press in a criminal way. And we learned from the press that investigators tell a lot of stories, for example that the alleged group of which our client is supposed to be a member can also be assigned to various other criminal offenses. The “evidence” for this thesis can be summarized as follows: It was about left-wing motivated acts, it was probably a woman. Such allegations are therefore in no way supported by concrete results of the investigation; in any case, there is nothing on this in the files that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office has submitted to us.

At the same time, the files made available to us for inspection turned out to be incomplete and noticeably out of date. There are no additional files and special issues with relevant investigative acts, in files relating to individual acts there are other specific persons than the accused.

Therefore, today we filed a criminal complaint against unknown persons with the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office because of the criminal disclosure of investigation files by the investigating authorities. On the other hand, we applied to actually allow us full access to the files.

We will not provide any further explanation at this early stage of the procedure.