Intelligence chief quits over neo-Nazi failure

The head of an agency which tracks extremists in the German state of Saxony has resigned after his staff failed to provide MPs with intelligence related to a neo-Nazi group that killed ten people.

Reinhard Boos is the third high-ranking German intelligence official to resign over alleged intelligence failures that allowed the National Socialist Underground, or NSU, to operate undetected for years, carrying out the killings over a seven-year period.

Earlier this month, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Heinz Fromm, stepped down after revelations that an official in his agency destroyed intelligence files on neo-Nazis. shortly after the extent of the NSU’s activities became public last November. His counterpart in the state of Thuringia, Thomas Sippel, stepped down days later, also in connection with intelligence failures in the case.

The third resignation in less than ten days has added to the authorities’ embarrassment about the NSU, which is suspected of killing eight Turkish men and a Greek between 2000 and 2006 and a policewoman in 2007 in attacks across the country. For years, authorities suspected organised crime rather than racist violence.

Saxony’s interior minister, Markus Ulbig, told the state parliament in Dresden yesterday that intelligence officials had failed to provide MPs with transcripts of telephone tapping operations dating back to 1998.