4 Guilty in Fatal Arson Attack on Turks in Germany

One of modern Germany’s most emotion-laden trials ended Friday in guilty verdicts for four young men accused of fatally firebombing a Turkish family’s house in the western city of Solingen.

The 1993 arson attack killed five young women and girls and critically injured three other people, including small children. It provoked the outrage of millions of foreigners living in Germany, politicians in Ankara and thousands of ordinary Germans, who took to the streets to complain that the government was not doing enough to protect foreign residents from a wave of neo-Nazi brutality.

The much-watched trial had been called Germany’s counterpart to the O.J. Simpson proceedings, as it included questions of racism and possible police misconduct. The five-judge panel found itself, as did the Simpson jury, called upon to right social wrongs that seemed to have little direct bearing on the facts of the case.

And, as with the Simpson trial, some Germans remained uncertain that justice had really been done after the verdicts were read. Two of the defendants had stoutly protested their innocence throughout the 18-month trial, and the prosecution could offer no physical evidence to prove its case.

“The chapter of hatred and violence against foreigners, of intolerance and of apathy has by no means been closed today,” said the German government’s representative for foreigner affairs, Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen.

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In a 128-page opinion, the presiding judge, Wolfgang Steffen, called the May 29, 1993, Solingen attack “one of the worst hate crimes against foreigners in German postwar history.”

Steffen also wrote that “the panel of judges was challenged up to the limits of its ability” by the sensitive and controversial case.

“But,” he added, “the judges have no doubt about the guilt of the defendants. The trial was a fair trial.”

The reading of the verdicts triggered tumultuous scenes in the Duesseldorf courtroom.

One defendant, Felix Koehnen, 18, cried out, “I’m not guilty,” called the judges “pigs” and burst into tears.

Koehnen and two other defendants who were minors at the time of the killings were sentenced to 10 years in a prison for young people, Germany’s maximum term for offenders under age 21.

A fourth defendant, Markus Gartmann, 25, was sentenced to 15 years in a regular prison. The prosecution had asked for life imprisonment.

The defendants’ families left the courtroom loudly protesting the verdicts, and lawyers for three of the defendants said they will appeal.

Germany had awaited Friday’s verdicts with trepidation. Turkish community groups, fearful of race riots if the white defendants were acquitted or received light sentences, appealed in advance for calm, issuing leaflets, making public announcements and hanging posters in mosques.

Outside the courthouse Friday, about 80 people, most of Turkish descent, waited anxiously, then expressed general satisfaction when the news of the convictions came.

“A peaceful coexistence between Turks and Germans will now be more possible,” said Faruk Sen, head of the Essen-based Center for Turkish Studies.

And the Turkish Foreign Ministry welcomed the verdict, saying it was a lesson to racist assailants.

But others among Germany’s Turkish population, nearly 2 million strong, argued that the sentences should have been for longer terms.

“I just don’t get it. It was murder,” a Solingen travel agency owner, Yilgit Huedaveldi, told the German Press Agency.

He predicted that the four convicted arsonists would be released early from prison, as have other German right-wing extremists jailed for attacks on foreigners.

Under German immigration law, Turks and other foreign-born residents of Germany are generally considered foreigners no matter how long they have lived in the country. The Solingen family whose house was firebombed had been living in the same house for 30 years.

The attack in Solingen, 30 miles north of Bonn, came at the peak of the anti-foreigner violence that swept Germany in the late 1980s and intensified with the 1990 unification of East and West Germany.

The attacks have since tapered off but have not entirely stopped. In July of this year alone, Germany’s federal criminal office registered 171 crimes triggered by xenophobia, including three arson attacks and 36 attacks on individuals.

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Courts have handed down light sentences in many of these incidents, giving German critics and international observers the impression that crimes against foreigners are not taken seriously enough by the German legal Establishment.

Public revulsion at the light sentences put pressure on the judges in the Solingen case to correct the impression of official apathy.

The Solingen case was a difficult one to use for sending a strong signal, however, because the evidence against the accused was unusually shaky.

The prosecutors had no fingerprints, weapons or other physical evidence. They constructed their case mainly on the conflicting confessions of two of the four defendants.

The eldest defendant, Gartmann, confessed to burning the Turkish home a few days after the attack. He provided extensive details, eventually apologized to the victims’ relatives, and he also implicated the other three defendants--Koehnen, Christian Reher, now 19, and Christian Buchholz, now 22.

But Gartmann’s credibility--and the prosecution’s case--were severely damaged midway through the trial when he suddenly recanted and said he had made up his confession under police pressure during interrogation.

Reher, meanwhile, changed his testimony again and again over the course of the investigation and trial, but near the end of the proceedings suddenly confessed to committing the attack alone. Reher is the only defendant who has not announced plans to appeal.

In addition to these dubious and conflicting “confessions,” the prosecutors based their case on the lack of any consistent alibis and on all four suspects’ known anti-foreigner sentiments.

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The defense argued, meanwhile, that police had conducted sloppy investigations, had threatened the suspects and had failed to keep a complete transcript of the interrogation sessions.

The defense argued that such police behavior tainted the case, but Chief Prosecutor Dirk Fernholz said in his closing arguments that “the gaffes of one police officer are irrelevant. . . . The complete array of evidence must be considered, and then there is no reasonable doubt about the guilt of the defendants.”

Petra Falkenberg of The Times’ Berlin Bureau contributed to this report.