https://theintercept.com/2017/10/18/germany-neo-nazi-murder-
trial-forensic-architecture/

A German Intelligence Agent Was at the Scene of a Neo-Nazi
Murder. He Can't Explain Why.
Robert Mackey
Robert Trafford
2017-10-18T17:50:23+00:00

The unwitting star of this year's edition of Documenta,
Germany's leading art festival, was not an artist, but a
former intelligence agent, Andreas Temme.

Temme, who now works in the personnel department of the
local government in Kassel, where the art festival takes
place, was arrested 11 years ago in connection with the
murder of Halit Yozgat. A son of Turkish immigrants, Yozgat
was shot and killed while sitting at the front counter of
his family's internet cafe on the evening of April 6, 2006.

Although the police cleared Temme as a suspect after a
nine-month investigation -- and a neo-Nazi terror cell
calling itself the National Socialist Underground, or NSU,
later claimed responsibility for the murder -- Temme's
presence at the scene of the crime, at a time when he was
employed by a regional intelligence service to monitor
right-wing extremists, has never been fully explained.

Yozgat's family is not alone in suspecting that the domestic
intelligence agency Temme worked for -- the state of Hesse's
Office for the Protection of the Constitution, known as the
Verfassungsschutz -- has been engaged in a cover-up since
2006. The Kassel police detective in charge of the murder
investigation, Helmut Wetzel, told a parliamentary inquiry
in 2015 that the state's intelligence service had refused to
let his officers question any of Temme's contacts in the
local neo-Nazi scene, including a paid informant Temme had
spoken with by phone shortly before entering the cafe that
evening.

Rather than act to dispel fears of a cover-up with full
public disclosure, the intelligence agency has taken the
opposite approach. In 2012, the state's interior minister
ordered a secret internal review of why Temme and other
agents with confidential sources within the local neo-Nazi
scene had failed to realize that Yozgat was the ninth victim
in a nationwide killing spree carried out by white
supremacist terrorists. When that report was completed in
2014, after a review of 3,500 files, senior intelligence
officials ordered that portions of it should be kept from
public view for 120 years. Local legislators, who stumbled
across a heavily redacted version of the document during
oversight hearings, were not even notified of its
existence.

The possibility that a German intelligence agency was, and
still is, hiding something about the most deadly neo-Nazi
terror cell to have operated inside the country since the
Second World War briefly made Temme a household name across
Germany. But attention to the case waned in recent years, as
journalists attempting to gain new information have run into
a brick wall of official silence. The case attracted a new
level of scrutiny this summer, however, when a skeptical
analysis of Temme's testimony, based on leaked police files,
became the most-talked-about piece at Documenta, an event
that hosted 800,000 visitors between July and September.

Forensic Architecture, Die Gesellschaft der Freund_innen von
Halit

The installation "77sqm_9:26min" confronted visitors to this
year's Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany with a
counter-investigation of the testimony of Andreas Temme, a
German intelligence agent who claims to have seen and heard
nothing at the scene of a neo-Nazi murder in 2006.

Photo: Mathias Völzke/documenta 14/Forensic Architecture

The three-screen video installation probing Temme's version
of events was not a work of imagination, but rather a
rigorous scientific investigation of whether he could have
been in the cafe during the murder, as the police still
believe, and somehow failed to either hear the shots or see
the body. The investigation was conducted by Forensic
Architecture, a team of experts in spatial analysis based at
Goldsmiths, University of London, who have previously
evaluated evidence of human rights abuses and potential war
crimes in Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Cameroon and Mexico.

The mystery surrounding Temme's visit to the cafe that
evening -- he logged in to a computer in the back room less
than 15 minutes before Yozgat was fatally shot twice in the
head from close range -- starts with the question of why he
fled the scene and failed to report to the police as a
witness after news of the murder broke.

When the police tracked him down -- the intelligence agent
had logged in to the dating site iLove.de from a computer in
the cafe under the pseudonym "wildman70," but also typed in
his real phone number -- Temme said that he had failed to
give evidence because he had seen and heard nothing of the
crime, and was embarrassed to have been there flirting
online while his pregnant wife was at home. It was also
possible, Temme said, that he might have left the cafe
seconds before the killing, since he was certain that he had
not heard any gunshots while sitting in the back room and
had not seen Yozgat's body lying on the floor behind the
front desk when he placed a coin on it and walked out.

Computer records from the cafe available to the police,
however, showed that Temme had logged out of PC-2 in the
cafe's back room at 5:01:40 p.m. that evening. By comparing
metadata from all the computers and phones in use in the
cafe that evening with the statements of witnesses who heard
loud sounds corresponding to two gunshots fired through a
silencer, detectives concluded that the murder most likely
occurred about 20 seconds before Temme logged out.

Despite the fact that Temme's story failed to convince the
police -- one detective called his account
"incomprehensible" in court -- the murder case against him
was dropped for want of evidence after nine months.

When it later emerged that Yozgat had been the ninth victim
in an anti-immigrant killing spree carried out by the
neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground between 2000 and
2006, Temme's presence in the cafe that evening fueled
speculation that the intelligence service might have had
advanced warning of the terror cell's plans, but still
failed to prevent the murder. The lack of a convincing
explanation for what Temme was doing at the scene of the
crime also prompted darker speculation. "The government's
intelligence agent either killed my son, or he saw the
murderers," the victim's father, Ismail Yozgat, said at a
memorial service for Halit in April.
mkcafe_101617-1508172134-1508266040

Leaked crime scene photographs show blood on the front desk
Andreas Temme left a coin on as he exited the Yozgat
internet cafe on April 6, 2006.

Photo: NSU Leaks

For a modern state, officially committed to multicultural
living, in which rights are bestowed on citizens equally,
regardless of their national or ethnic origin, Germany is
struggling to explain how its security apparatus failed for
more than a decade to stop the NSU before the neo-Nazis
killed nine ethnic minorities, detonated two bombs in
immigrant communities, killed a police officer, and carried
out 15 armed robberies.
ARCHIV: Die Aufnahme einer Ueberwachungskamera in einer
Bankfiliale in Arnstadt vom 7. September 2011 zeigt zwei
Bankraeuber beim Ueberfall auf die Filiale. Am 4. November
2011 wurden die Leichen von Uwe Mundlos und Uwe Boehnhard in
einem ausgebrannten Wohnmobil in Eisenach entdeckt. Am 4.
November 2011 wurden die Leichen von Uwe Mundlos und Uwe
Boehnhardt in einem ausgebrannten Wohnmobil in Eisenach
entdeckt. Am gleichen Tag explodierte das Wohnhaus in der
Fruehlingsstrasse in Zwickau, wo Mundlos und Boehnhardt
gemeinsam mit Beate Zschaepe gelebt haben und im Zuge der
anschliessenden Ermittlungen als das Zwickauer Terror-Trio
"Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund" (NSU) bekannt geworden
sind. (zu dapd-Text)Foto: Polizei/dapd

Security camera video caught Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt
during a National Socialist Underground bank raid in
Arnstadt, Germany in September 2011.

Photo: Police Handout/DAPD

In fact, the intelligence failure was more profound than not
stopping the NSU attacks: it extended to not even suspecting
that right-wing extremists were behind the killing spree.

Before November 2011, when two members of the cell, Uwe
Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, killed themselves following a
botched robbery, and the third, Beate Zschäpe, turned
herself in, the German police had spent years pursuing the
theory that all nine murders were somehow connected to the
Turkish underworld. The special police investigation of what
the German media had called the "döner murders," in
reference to the kebabs sold by Turkish immigrants, was even
code-named "Bosporus," after the strait that separates
Europe from Asia.

One week after Yozgat's murder in 2006, the head of the
Bosporus unit told the media that he could see "no
connection" between the victims (eight of them had family
roots in Turkey, one in Greece).
Ein Bildschirmfoto aus dem Bekennervideo der Mitglieder der
terroristischen Vereinigung "Nationalsozialistischer
Untergrund" (NSU) zeigt die Figur "Paulchen Panther" aus der
Zeichentrick-Serie "Pink Panther", die neben einem Bild mit
einer Deutschland-Karte, einem Foto von Halit Yozgat, dem 9.
Opfer der NSU-Mordserie, und der Aufschrift "9. Tuerke
erschossen" steht. Am 4. November 2011 wurden die Leichen
von Uwe Mundlos und Uwe Boehnhardt in einem ausgebrannten
Wohnmobil in Eisenach entdeckt. Am gleichen Tag explodierte
das Wohnhaus in der Fruehlingsstrasse in Zwickau, wo Mundlos
und Boehnhardt gemeinsam mit Beate Zschaepe gelebt haben und
im Zuge der anschliessenden Ermittlungen als das Zwickauer
Terror-Trio "Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund" (NSU)
bekannt geworden sind. (zu dapd-Text)Foto: -/dapd

A screenshot from a confessional video made by the National
Socialist Underground, in which the neo-Nazi group digitally
altered old images from Pink Panther cartoons to take credit
for the murder of nine men from immigrant families across
Germany between 2000 and 2006.

Photo: DAPD News Agency

When the police searched the hideout in eastern Germany that
Zschäpe had shared with Mundlos and Böhnhardt, however,
they found the gun used in all nine racist murders, a Ceská
83 pistol. They also found copies of a bizarre confessional
video made by the neo-Nazis, in which they used images from
old Pink Panther cartoons to take credit for the terror
attacks on immigrant communities across Germany over the
previous decade.

After years of police efforts to find killers with Turkish
roots, the revelation that the murders were instead the work
of German neo-Nazis prompted an apology to the victims'
families from Chancellor Angela Merkel, who promised a full
accounting of who was involved in the crimes, and how the
investigation had gone so far off-track.

"Most of you were abandoned in your time of need," Merkel
told the victims' relatives at a memorial service in Berlin
in 2012. "Some relatives were themselves for years suspected
of wrongdoing," she said. "That is particularly oppressive.
For this, I ask for your forgiveness."

More than five years later however, as Zschäpe's trial
grinds to a conclusion, and Merkel's Christian Democrats
find themselves hemorrhaging support to the anti-immigrant
far-right, the authorities seem eager to move on, leaving
unanswered the most uncomfortable questions about the
intelligence failure and possible cover-up.

In the Munich court where Zschäpe and four accomplices
accused of aiding the terrorist group are on trial, the
presiding judge, Manfred Götzl, has limited the scope of
the inquiry. Specifically, the judge excluded questions
about whether Germany's 17 domestic intelligence services --
the federal Verfassungsschutz and the independent agencies
in each of the country's 16 states -- many of which maintain
networks of paid informants inside neo-Nazi circles, knew
the cell existed but failed to inform the police.

Evidence presented in court, and to federal and state-level
parliamentary inquiries, has revealed that dozens of
neo-Nazis across Germany were on the payroll of various
intelligence agencies during the NSU killing spree. As
Stefan Aust, Helmar Büchel and Dirk Laabs reported, one of
the terrorists, Uwe Mundlos, even worked for a construction
firm owned by an informant in 2001, when three of the
murders took place.
dpatop - Defendant Beate Zschaepe (2.f.l) enters the court
room at the Oberlandesgericht court in Munich, Germany, 4
October 2017. Her lawyer Mathias Grasel can be seen in the
foreground. Photo by: Tobias Hase/picture-alliance/dpa/AP
Images

Defendant Beate Zschäpe enters the court room at the
Oberlandesgericht court in Munich, Germany, Oct. 4, 2017.

Photo: Tobias Hase/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Lawyers representing 95 victims or relatives of those killed
by the NSU have said since the trial began in 2013 that
justice will not be served if the process simply results in
a life sentence for Zschäpe without providing answers as to
how and why their husbands, fathers, or brothers were
targeted, and -- most importantly -- what German
intelligence officials knew of the cell at the time.

Osman Tasköprü, whose brother Süleyman Tasköprü, a
grocer in Hamburg, was murdered by the neo-Nazi terrorists
in 2001, told Turkey's Anadolu news agency in July that
Zschäpe's trial was "not uncovering the facts. Everything
is being hidden." Not enough had changed since his brother's
murder, Tasköprü said. "At the time, the German state, the
public, and the police pointed their fingers at us. No one
deemed it necessary to investigate xenophobia. No one talked
of far-right groups. They only pressured us," he recalled.

Tasköprü was among the relatives of the victims Merkel
invited to Berlin in 2012. "We sat at the same table. She
told us that they wanted to enlighten the entire matter. She
is yet to keep her promise," he said.

Some of Merkel's colleagues in the German Parliament, the
Bundestag, agree that the intelligence services have failed
to come clean about why they didn't stop the NSU. A
Bundestag investigative committee reported in June that the
intelligence services had obstructed investigations of the
murders to protect their paid informants. One of the authors
of the Bundestag committee's report, Irene Mihalic of the
German Green Party, told Deutsche Welle that the federal
Verfassungsschutz had made a "deliberate and specific"
decision to shred files with information provided by
neo-Nazi informants on November 11, 2011, one week after
Zschäpe surrendered.

The official who had destroyed the files, testifying to
federal prosecutors in 2014 under an assumed name, said he
did so to spare the intelligence services from having to
answer difficult questions about why so many neo-Nazi
informants had apparently failed to report the terrorist
activities of Mundlos, Böhnhardt, and Zschäpe. "Destroyed
files can't be checked," he explained.

Even the chair of the Bundestag's investigation, Clemens
Binninger of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, said that
evidence available to the inquiry suggests that the terror
cell had more than three members -- meaning that neo-Nazis
involved in the murders have been allowed to walk free.
"There is a slew of evidence that suggests that there must
have been co-perpetrators at the scene, who helped or acted
as lookouts," Binninger told the Frankfurter Rundschau, a
German daily, last month.

"We have a situation where central questions of the victims'
relatives, 'Why was my husband, my brother, our daughter
killed?' remain unanswered," said another member of the
committee, Petra Pau of the Left Party.

In the specific case of Halit Yozgat's murder, Helmut
Wetzel, the detective who led the Kassel police department's
investigation, told a committee of the Hesse state
parliament in 2015 that, in his view, the local intelligence
agency was protecting a liar. "I think Temme witnessed the
act," Wetzel said. The detective added that senior officials
in the state's intelligence agency had not taken seriously
the need for a full police investigation of its agent.

Wetzel also heaped scorn on Temme's claim that, at the time
of Yozgat's murder, no one in the intelligence service
suspected that Yozgat and the previous eight victims killed
with the same gun had been targeted by right-wing
extremists. "You did not have to be a clairvoyant to
understand that this was a xenophobic crime," Wetzel said.

Frustrated by the failure of the German state to deliver the
full accounting Merkel had promised, advocates for the
families have taken it upon themselves to keep prodding the
authorities for answers.

One such initiative was a People's Tribunal, dedicated to
unravelling what civil society activists call "the NSU
complex," by which they mean both the extent of the terror
cell's network and the structural racism in German society
that allowed the nationalist terror cell to go undetected
for so long.

Before the tribunal convened in Cologne in May, near the
site of an NSU nail bomb attack that wounded 22 people in
2004, the group commissioned Forensic Architecture, a team
of seasoned investigators (and a publishing partner of The
Intercept) to conduct a fresh examination of the ninth
murder in the series -- the killing of Halit Yozgat.

The team, led by architects from Israel and Greece, Eyal
Weizman and Christina Varvia, had previously used
architectural modeling to analyze open-source evidence of
potential violations from drone strikes in Pakistan;
American, Russian, and Syrian air raids in Syria; the
torture of prisoners in Cameroon; and attacks on protesters
in Palestine.

In this case, to conduct a counter-forensic examination of
Temme's claim that he neither heard nor saw any evidence of
the killing, the researchers from Forensic Architecture used
leaked files from the original police investigation,
including witness testimonies, computer and phone logs,
crime scene photographs and, most importantly, a police
video showing Temme re-enacting his exit from the internet
cafe in 2006.

In Weizman's view, if Temme was lying when he demonstrated
for the police how he left the cafe without observing
anything out of the ordinary, the video itself might be
considered evidence of a crime: perjury. "In our office,
usually we look at video of bombs falling in Gaza or in Iraq
or in Syria, and we undertake a very, very close analysis of
the video," the architect said at a public presentation of
the investigation in May. "We are looking here, potentially,
at an alleged crime as it is taking place," he added.

The researchers also interviewed the victim's father, Ismail
Yozgat, who described the exact position of his son's body
on the floor behind the counter when he saw that his son had
been murdered.

This independent analysis of Temme's testimony seemed
necessary to the Yozgat family because the sealed
intelligence report on the former agent's presence at the
crime scene has obscured key aspects of what led to the
murder, and whether it could have been prevented by the
state.

The police investigation of Temme was hampered from the
start by his status as an intelligence agent. Officers who
arrived at his home two weeks after the murder did not
immediately search it for evidence once he revealed that he
was with the Verfassungsschutz. The police subsequently
found a cache of guns in Temme's home -- and Nazi literature
and regalia, including sheets of paper with quotes from
"Mein Kampf" that he had typed out as a young man. But the
officers were denied permission to question the neo-Nazi
informant Temme had spoken with less than an hour before the
murder of Yozgat.

The police request to speak with the informant was
ultimately blocked by the interior minister for the state of
Hesse at the time, Volker Bouffier, a senior figure in
Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, who cited a need to
protect undercover sources. Bouffier, who apparently met
Temme at a political event some years before Yozgat's
murder, is today the state's first minister.

The investigation of Temme as a suspect in the murder
concluded nine months later, after he adamantly denied being
a neo-Nazi -- chalking up his interest in "Mein Kampf" to a
since-faded youthful fascination with the Third Reich. But
the detectives who questioned him have never been convinced
by his claim to have heard and seen nothing. The lead
detective in Kassel and a police analyst who prepared a
report on the case in 2008 for the Bosporus investigation
both concluded that the murder almost certainly took place
while Temme was still sitting in the cafe.

If Temme was in the cafe's back room, still logged in to the
dating site, when the murder took place, his version of
events can only be truthful if he first failed to hear the
shots being fired and then failed to notice Yozgat's body
lying on the floor behind the blood-spattered counter in the
front room as he paused to leave a coin there before
exiting. If, on the other hand, Temme did see the body and
hear the shots, his presence at the crime scene could be the
clearest evidence that a German intelligence service is
still hiding its contemporaneous knowledge of the NSU's
killing spree.

An excerpt from "77sqm_9:26min," a video report by Forensic
Architecture, explaining the methodology of its
counter-investigation of the testimony of Andres Temme in
relation to the murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel, Germany,
on April 6, 2006.

To test Temme's account of how he left the internet cafe
without hearing or seeing anything out of the ordinary, the
Forensic Architecture team conducted a series of sensory
experiments based on the leaked re-enactment video. The
experiments, to establish what Temme should have been able
to hear and see, were conducted both in computer simulations
and in a full-scale replica of the internet cafe built at
the House of World Cultures in Berlin in March.

An excerpt from "77sqm_9:26min," a video report by Forensic
Architecture, presenting the results of its experiment on
how loud the gunshots that killed Halit Yozgat would have
been from the computer Andres Temme used in the internet
cafe's back room.

The results of the audio experiments were clear: For an
eighth of a second, each of the two gunshots would have
produced a sound pressure in the back room close to 100
decibels, or as loud as a jackhammer breaking concrete in
the front room.

"The data from both the physical and digital tests confirmed
that the sound level at Temme's position at PC-2 was between
94 to 99 decibels at maximum level," Forensic Architecture
reported. "This is 40 to 45 decibels above the maximum
ambient sound level that can be expected in such a space."

An excerpt from "77sqm_9:26min," a video report by Forensic
Architecture, presenting the results of its experiment on
how visible the body of Halit Yozgat would have been from
the perspective of Andres Temme if he left the internet cafe
after the shooting.

The tests of what passed before Temme's eyes after the
shooting were even more compelling. Using the police
re-enactment video and motion-detection software, as well as
analog measures, the architects made a computer animation of
Temme's cone of vision as he left the cafe.

The researchers then repeated the test in the physical model
they had built in Berlin, with a camera attached to the head
of an actor, to show clearly that Yozgat's body would have
been visible to a man of Temme's height (nearly 6-foot-3,
according to the local police) as he approached the counter
and leaned down to leave a coin.

When Forensic Architecture first presented its experimental
findings in April, for the 11th anniversary of Yozgat's
murder, the work was praised in news reports across Germany,
but a leader of Merkel's Christian Democrats in Hesse,
Holger Bellino, dismissed renewed suggestions that Temme had
lied about not witnessing the murder as "another conspiracy
theory." The Forensic Architecture analysis, Bellino
complained, had not examined the possibility that Temme
might have left the cafe seconds before the killing -- a
scenario the police called unlikely.

The Forensic Architecture team then added a section to their
report that included an analysis of the estimated time of
the murder and Temme's exit from the cafe, based on the
log-in data available to the Kassel police in 2006, which
was leaked online in 2015. That longer version of the report
was then featured in Documenta, the art festival in Kassel.
The 27-minute video, "77sqm_9:26min," was presented as a
three-channel installation in the city's old post office
building, which is located only a few hundred yards from the
scene of Yozgat's murder.

Forensic Architecture's report, and the technical data
underpinning it, was presented alongside other works
documenting the impact of Yozgat's murder, including video
of a protest in Kassel one month after his death, in which
thousands of members of the city's immigrant community had
marched through the streets, demanding the arrest of the
killers responsible for the series of racist murders.

Kein 10. Opfer! (2006) Video documenting the "No 10th
Victim!" demonstration in Kassel, Germany on May 6, 2006.
The slogan "Yalniz Degilsiniz," is Turkish for "You Are Not
Alone." Video: Sefa Defterli

That demonstration, from a community that knew it was the
target of racist terror attacks, underscores just how blind
the police were to the most likely motivation for the
murders at the time.

"From September 2000 to April 6, 2006, nine independent
business owners have been killed with the same weapon,"
Ismail Yozgat, Halit's father, said at the end of the march
that day, outside Kassel's City Hall. "How many executions
have to be carried out before the perpetrators are caught?"

He went on to accuse the local interior ministry of ignoring
the suffering of the immigrant families. "Listen to the
grief of the families. Try to put yourselves in our place.
Try to understand what it means for my family to lose a
child in the best years of his life," Yozgat said. "If you
do this, I believe you'll feel our pain and you'll
understand our situation. We're mourning for our son. And we
don't want others to have to mourn in the future."

Ayse Gülec, a founding member of the People's Tribunal and
the Society of Friends of Halit, remembers those who marched
after Yozgat's murder in 2006 feeling like "ghosts,"
unnoticed by their neighbors and the authorities. "The
politicians and also the police don't care, that was the
experience of this community," she told The Intercept. "This
is what we call structural racism."

Temme, reached by phone at his office in a local government
building in Kassel, told The Intercept he had not visited
the Documenta exhibit, but he considered it biased against
him because it was commissioned by advocates for the
families of NSU victims.

When excerpts from the Forensic Architecture video were
screened for him recently during a parliamentary inquiry
into intelligence failures revealed by the NSU case, Temme's
first response was to express surprise that, as "the lead
actor" in the re-enactment video used in "the art work," no
one had asked permission to use his image. Surely, he said
over stunned laughter from the public gallery at the
hearing, he must have some share in its copyright.
001_1-1030x274-1508265974

To conduct experiments on what Andreas Temme would have seen
if he left the internet cafe after Halit Yozgat's murder,
Forensic Architecture built a full-scale replica of the
space.

Image: Forensic Architecture

After watching an excerpt where the sound level of the
gunshots that killed Yozgat was demonstrated in Forensic
Architecture's full-scale model of the internet cafe, Temme
said that he remained certain that he had not heard the
shots and was unsure as to whether he was still in the cafe
at the time. "Either I did not hear the sound, because I
might have already left, or I did not notice it," he said.
"I would still like to know," Temme added, "whether I was
there or not."

Temme echoed that sentiment in his phone interview with The
Intercept, saying that the question of whether he was
present in the cafe when the shots were fired would perhaps
never be answered.

He also pointed out that Holger Bellino, a Christian
Democrat deputy in the Hesse state parliament, recently
criticized Forensic Architecture for using leaked files from
the 2006 police investigation which included some faulty
data. Bellino based his critique on more accurate records of
the duration of phone calls made by other witnesses from
inside the cafe that evening, contained in a previously
secret 2008 federal police report.

However, the 2008 police report, which has been obtained by
The Intercept and is published here for the first time, does
not exonerate Temme. The data, and an accompanying police
analysis, merely show that it is possible that the killing
took place seconds after Temme left the cafe, but only if a
series of events, for which there is no evidence, took place
in rapid succession.

Temme's version of events -- that he logged out from his
computer, walked to the front room to pay, and, when he
could not find Yozgat, placed a coin on the front desk and
left -- could only have taken place before the murder if
Yozgat had gone for a walk outside, unseen by any witnesses,
minutes before the shooting, and the killers had then
followed him back inside, waited for him to sit back down
behind the counter, shot him twice, and escaped, all within
65 seconds.

The police analyst who prepared the previously unseen 2008
report, Gerhard Frese, had ruled out that scenario as
unlikely. In testimony to the Hesse parliamentary inquiry
last month, Frese said that, "in my personal opinion,"
Temme, an experience marksman, must have heard the shots and
then smelled the gunpowder when he stepped into the front
room seconds later. Frese added that he was also "relatively
certain" that the intelligence agent must have seen Yozgat's
body lying behind the counter as he leaned down to place a
coin on a desk flecked with the victim's blood.

It is not clear why Bellino, the Christian Democrat
legislator in Hesse, has worked so hard to sow doubt in
Forensic Architecture's findings by endorsing this unlikely
scenario, but it is worth keeping in mind that police
officers who have publicly accused Temme of lying have known
about those records for nearly a decade.

Joachim Börger, the former chief inspector of the local
police force who interrogated Temme in 2006, told the Hesse
public inquiry in August that he still found it difficult to
believe that the intelligence agent had not seen Yozgat's
body.

Another police source with direct knowledge of the initial
investigation into Yozgat's murder, who asked not to be
identified because the NSU trial is still in progress in
Munich, confirmed to The Intercept that the newly public
phone records did not change his conclusion that the most
likely scenario remains that Temme only logged out of his
computer in the cafe about 20 seconds after the neo-Nazi
killers, presumably Mundlos and Böhnhardt, burst through
the front door and fired the fatal shots.
BERLIN, GERMANY - FEBRUARY 23: German Chancellor Angela
Merkel (C) speaks with relatives of victims at a state
commemoration for the victims of the NSU neo-Nazi murders at
the Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt on February 23, 2012 in
Berlin, Germany. German government leaders, state officials
and relatives of the victims are commemorating the nine
immigrants and one policewoman murdered over a 10-year
period in a killing spree by Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt,
members of the National Socialist Underground, or NSU, a
Neo-Nazi terrorist organization that went undetected by
German law enforcement until the two men committed suicide
last year after a police chase following a bank robbery. The
case has caused a scandal for German law enforcement
officials and brought politicians to re-examine the danger
of right-wing crime. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood between Ismail Yozgat
and Turgut Yozgat, the father and brother of Halit Yozgat,
at a memorial for victims of the National Socialist
Underground in Berlin on February 23, 2012.

Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Five years after Angela Merkel promised closure for the
families of the NSU victims, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that members of her party in Hesse seem to be
running interference for Temme. By refusing to accept
Forensic Architecture's findings -- which are in complete
agreement with those of the police detectives who first
investigated the murder -- the regional leaders of Merkel's
Christian Democrat party appear more invested in concealing
an intelligence agent's activities than in providing a
public accounting of his failure to protect the life of the
German-born son of Turkish immigrants.

"This is not a trial in which evidence is there to convict
Temme of being an aid to murder," Weizman of Forensic
Architecture says. "We're not even trying to convict him of
perjury. We're trying to demonstrate that his statements are
questionable enough that the files need to be opened."

In other words, if the intelligence agency's internal report
on its failings does explain what its agent was doing at the
cafe that evening and why he left without reporting to the
police as a witness, that information needs to be made
public for trust in the security services to be restored.
"There's going to be no clarity without that fully in the
public domain," Weizman says.

"However hard the truth may be," Weizman adds, "it would be
better -- first of all for the family, but also for other
migrants who feel now more threatened than ever, as well as
for Germany as a whole -- to know what went on in this
internet cafe and, by extension, with Germany's secret
services in relation to the case."

Matthias Dusini contributed reporting.