The State Criminal Police Office of North Rhine-Westphalia (LKA NRW) has reviewed 30 past violent crimes between 1984 and 2020 with fatalities from NRW for a possible right-wing extremist background. This was prompted by the reassessment of a case from 2003, which was subsequently recognized as a right-wing extremist homicide. The Ministry of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia then commissioned an interdisciplinary team of experts from the LKA NRW to identify controversial cases and re-examine them from today's perspective with an unbiased eye.
Together with Interior Minister Herbert Reul, LKA Director Ingo Wünsch and those responsible for the "ToreG NRW" project group (victims of right-wing violence in NRW) will present the results on Tuesday, September 3: The experts assess seven of the examined cases as acts with a political motivation, which is why they believe that in some cases a corresponding correction in the police statistics is necessary.
The fact that the cases have been processed is particularly important for the bereaved. "It was necessary for us to review and reassess the cases from the past," says Interior Minister Herbert Reul. "If it is right-wing extremism, it should be named as such and recorded in the statistics."
The group of experts, led by a political scientist, meticulously analyzed the violent crimes from the years 1984 to 2020 for over a year and consulted court rulings and case files. The guiding question was whether the killing of one or more people was motivated by right-wing extremism.
"With the ToreG NRW project, we are facing up to our social responsibility as the NRW police force. The interdisciplinary project team at my office took the approach of including current knowledge as well as contemporary social perspectives and sensitivities to right-wing extremism in the assessment," says Ingo Wünsch, Head of the LKA NRW.