Germany’s intelligence agency estimates that far-right linked crimes rose by 3 percent in 2018.
At least nine people were shot and killed on Wednesday by an attacker with suspected far-right links in an overnight rampage in a German city.
The attack was carried out at two shisha lounges in Hanau, a town not far from Frankfurt. Police are trying to identify the victims, some of whom were believed to be migrants from Turkey.
The suspected 43-year-old attacker and his mother were found dead in his apartment early on Thursday.
There have been a number of far-right attacks in recent years in Germany, with violence rising sharply in 2015 when the country took in more than one million migrants.
The German domestic intelligence agency estimated that the number of violent crimes with far-right elements rose by 3 percent in 2018, although attacks on centres for asylum seekers fell after a spike in 2015 and 2016.
Earlier this month, German police arrested 12 men on suspicion of involvement in a far-right plot to overthrow the political order by means of targeted attacks.
Here is a timeline including recent far-right attacks that took place in Germany:
February 20, 2020: A 43-year-old gunman kills at least nine people in a shooting rampage in Hanau, a town near Frankfurt. The gunman is suspected to have had far-right views. After a huge manhunt, his body was found next to his mother’s.
October 9, 2019: A gunman who denounced Jews opens fire outside a German synagogue in the eastern city of Halle on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, killing two people as he live streams his attack. The attacker, a 27-year-old German, fatally shoots a woman outside the synagogue and a man inside a nearby kebab shop.
June 2, 2019: Pro-immigration German politician Walter Luebcke is found lying in a pool of blood outside his home in the state of Hesse. Stephan Ernst, a German far-right sympathiser initially confesses to the crime and later retracts his confession. Luebcke was hated by the far right because he defended Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s 2015 decision to accept refugees.