Police have launched an online portal seeking tips about an arson attack on a synagogue in the northern German city of Oldenburg last Friday that prompted widespread outrage.

An incendiary device was thrown at the front door of the synagogue. Two janitors at a neighbouring cultural centre discovered the fire and extinguished it. No one was injured, but the perpetrators managed to escape and have not been identified.

Police investigating the crime announced the portal for tips on Thursday, and added that videos and photos could also be uploaded to the site.

A reward of €5,000 (about $5,400) has also been offered for tips that help solve the crime and identify the perpetrators.

The incident made headlines nationwide in Germany and prompted expressions of outrage and horror from leaders.

On Sunday, about 400 people took part in a rally in Oldenburg organized by a local alliance against anti-Semitism.

The Central Council of Jews is deeply shocked by the electoral success of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a local election in Thuringia.

“To be clear: not every one of the AfD voters has extreme right-wing views,” said the president of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, according to the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper.

“But the party whose candidates they voted for is, according to the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, extreme right-wing.”

Schuster said he was deeply concerned that so many people agreed with this. “This is a breach of the dam that the democratic political forces in this country cannot simply accept.”

The International Auschwitz Committee also responded with horror to the result.

Executive Vice President Christoph Heubner said, “Today is a sad day for the Sonneberg district, for Germany and for democracy. A majority of voters have obviously said goodbye to democracy and deliberately opted for an extreme right-wing party of destruction dominated by a Nazi.”

Unidentified perpetrators have scrawled graffiti over posters with photographic portraits of survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar, according to police.

A police spokesperson said on Thursday that a charge of damage to property had been filed. The police assume that the act was politically motivated. The graffiti on the two portraits would be removed as soon as possible, they said.

The pictures are part of an open-air exhibition in Weimar called “The Witnesses”, which shows large-format portrait photographs of former prisoners of the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald. Panels of the exhibition have also been defaced in the past.

The organisers of the Jewish-themed Achava Festival, which regularly takes place in Weimar, posted about the case on Twitter on Wednesday evening and asked for witnesses to come forward. “Today two photographs were smeared and thus desecrated!” they tweeted.

In all, 280,000 people were imprisoned in Buchenwald during the Nazi era, with 56,000 losing their lives there.

A German court has said that a military officer indicted on allegations that he plotted to kill prominent politicians and blame the attack on refugees will go on trial in May.

The case of the officer, identified only as 1st Lt Franco A in line with German privacy rules, raised concerns about extremism in the country’s military.

The Frankfurt state court said he will go on trial on May 18.

The 32-year-old suspect, who is currently free pending trial, is accused of planning a serious act of violence among other offences.

Prosecutors allege the suspect, whom they have described as a “right-wing nationalist”, managed to pose as a Syrian asylum seeker and planned to carry out his attack under that identity so that refugees would be blamed.

His alleged targets included then-justice minister Heiko Maas and he had stockpiled four firearms including an assault rifle, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition and more than 50 explosive devices, some stolen from military stores, prosecutors said.

The suspect came to the attention of authorities after he was arrested in February 2017 while going to retrieve a pistol he had stashed in a Vienna airport bathroom.

He was freed, but Austrian authorities informed Germany.

When the soldier’s fingerprint matched the one he had given when he registered as a refugee, it triggered the investigation.

A German court has convicted a right-wing extremist of murder and attempted murder and sentenced him to life in prison for his attack on a synagogue last year on Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day.

He killed two people after he failed to gain entry to the building.

The October 9 2019 attack is considered one of the worst anti-Semitic assaults in Germany’s post-war history.

The 28-year-old defendant, Stephan Balliet, posted a screed against Jews before trying to shoot his way into the synagogue in the eastern city of Halle while broadcasting the attack live on a popular gaming site.

Judges at the Naumburg state court, which met in the state capital Magdeburg for security and capacity reasons, found him “seriously culpable”, news agency dpa reported.

That means he will be effectively barred from early release after 15 years, which is typical for people in Germany given life sentences.

Presiding Judge Ursula Mertens described it as a “cowardly attack” as she announced the verdict.

Balliet showed no reaction but took notes.

During his trial, which began in July, Balliet admitted he wanted to enter the synagogue and kill all the 51 people inside.

When he was unable to open the building’s heavy doors, the German shot and killed a 40-year-old woman in the street outside and a 20-year-old man at a nearby kebab shop, and wounded several others.

He apologised to the court for killing the woman, saying that “I didn’t want to kill whites”.

German authorities have vowed to step up measures against far-right extremism following the Halle attack, the killing of a regional politician by a suspected neo-Nazi and the fatal shooting of nine people of immigrant background in Hanau – all of which happened within a year.

Read More: Far right extremist admits arson attack on synagogue in Exeter

Germany’s leaders are struggling to work out how to counter a recent rise in right-wing hate, 75 years after the Nazis were driven from power.

Wednesday’s shooting rampage that began at a hookah bar in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau was Germany’s third deadly far-right attack in a matter of months and came at a time when the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has become the country’s first political party in decades to establish itself as a significant force on the extreme right.

In the wake of the latest spasm of violence, Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced the “poison” of racism and hatred in Germany, and other politicians similarly condemned the shootings.

The rampage followed October’s anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue in Halle and the killing in June of a regional politician who supported Mrs Merkel’s welcoming policy toward migrants.

But Germany’s top security official, interior minister Horst Seehofer, said the trend goes back further, noting a 2016 attack on a Munich mall against migrants and a years-long cross-country killing spree against foreigners by a group calling itself the National Socialist Underground.

“Since the NSU and the rampage in Munich through today, an extreme-right trail of blood has run through our country,” he said.

Extremism is no new phenomenon in modern-day Germany, where the Red Army Faction and other radical-left groups waged a campaign of kidnappings and killings from the 1970s through the 1990s, and where some of the key September 11 plotters lived and schemed before heading to the US to attend flight school ahead of the 2001 attacks.

Germany has strict laws prohibiting any glorification of the Nazis, with bans on symbols like the swastika and gestures like the stiff-armed salute, and denial of the Holocaust is illegal.

But security officials have frequently been accused of being “blind in the right eye”, for intentionally or inadvertently overlooking some far-right activity.

That was said to be the case with the NSU, which was able to kill 10 people, primarily immigrants, between 2000 and 2007 in attacks written off by investigators as organised crime.

It was only after two NSU members died in 2011 in a botched robbery that the group’s activities were uncovered.

Mehmet Gurcan Daimaguler, a lawyer who represented victims’ families at the trial of an NSU member, said German authorities need to give more than “lip service” to fighting racism.

“We haven’t really begun yet a real fight against neo-Nazis, and one of the reasons, for me, clearly is the victims,” he said.

“The victims of Nazis are not members of the German middle class, but Muslims, migrants, LGBT people, immigrants.

“As long as the victim pool, so to say, was limited to minorities, it was not considered a real threat for society.”

Mr Seehofer said that has changed, noting increased resources are being devoted to fighting far-right crime, including the addition of hundreds of new federal investigators and domestic intelligence agents.

In addition, stricter laws have been passed, and the Cabinet approved a bill just this week, before the Hanau attacks, to crack down on hate speech and online extremism.

Under the bill, which is awaiting passage in parliament, internet companies would have to report a wide range of hate speech to police, and retweeting such material to a wide audience, or explicitly condoning it publicly, could be subject to prosecution.

“We are not blind in any eye,” Mr Seehofer said.

Still, with national elections coming next year, politicians are grappling with strategies to confront AfD and blunt its appeal to disgruntled voters.

The AfD does not espouse violence, but many are accusing the party of producing a climate where right-wing extremism can flourish.

The seven-year-old party now has members in all 16 state parliaments and is the largest opposition party nationally, though with less than 13% of the vote in the last election.

“One cannot see this crime in isolation,” said Norbert Roettgen, one of several members of Mrs Merkel’s party hoping to succeed her as chancellor when her term ends next year.

“We need to fight the poison that is being dragged into our society by the AfD and others.”

Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader, accused Mr Roettgen and others of trying to exploit the Hanau violence for political advantage.

“Everything that we know is that it was a totally crazy person,” Mr Gauland said.

The gunman, 43-year-old Tobias Rathjen, posted rambling writings and videos online ahead of the attacks, advocating genocide and espousing theories about mind control.

Mr Gauland, who once got in trouble for downplaying the Nazi era as a speck of “bird poop” in German history, said Rathjen had probably never heard any of his speeches, and he rejected any connection between the bloodshed and his party’s anti-migrant platform, as did several other AfD leaders.

But Mr Seehofer said the power of words cannot be discounted.

“I can’t deny that a statement that Nazism is a speck of bird poop in history provides this fertile soil,” Mr Seehofer said.

“There are also many other remarks that, in my view, mess up heads, and something bad comes from messed-up heads far too often.”

Holger Muench, head of the BKA, Germany’s equivalent to the FBI, said the threat from mentally disturbed people has grown in recent years, as they latch on to ideas often found online and turn violent.

“The fact that there are mentally ill people in society, that is unchanged for the most part,” he said.

“But the fact that there are mentally ill people with a world view that makes them a risk to serious acts of violence, that is changing.”

No evidence has emerged to link Mr Rathjen to the AfD.

But people in Hanau were quick to suggest at least an indirect connection.

Dieter Hog watched as the police descended upon Rathjen’s house after the shootings and said he did not know his neighbour or what might have motivated him.

“But it might be the seed of Mr Hoecke,” he said, referring to Bjoern Hoecke, an AfD leader who called Berlin’s memorial to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust a “monument of shame”.

And Hatice Nazerzadeh, the woman who shouted at German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier during the candlelight vigil, said that with the party’s ascent, attacks are becoming common.

Parts of AfD are already under close scrutiny by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, but she said more should be done.

“The core problem is the AfD,” said Ms Nazerzadeh, whose cousin was shot in the head by Rathjen and killed.

“As long as the AfD is legal, racism is legal.”

In 2016, intelligence services estimated that there were just over 23,000 right-wing extremists in Germany. A myriad of groups networking covertly, utilizing social media to extreme effect, was sowing major social discord. Germany has in modern times been regarded by the rest as immune to the reach of the far-right, partly out of collective shame for Nazism. The country had seen where hate led and would not saunter down that path again.

DOWNLOAD THE PEGIDA REPORT HERE

But today, the country exists as a hotbed of far-right extremism. The proliferation of populist, racist movements has caught many within its political class off guard. One such group is Pegida.

The movement caught on fire in late 2014 through to early 2015, whipping up mass anger around immigration. The organisation threatened Germany’s long held social cohesion, fracturing it in the backwaters of east Germany where anti-immigration attitudes had been rapidly bubbling for a while. Pegida’s aim was to force into the national conversation the concept of a national cultural identity being threatened by refugees and asylum seekers. It was dangerous, but for a while, it was effective. The group came to influence the political system, and particularly, the part Alternative for Germany (AfD). This report will look into their tumultuous history, their peak moments, setbacks, controversies and structural reasons for why they were as popular as they were.

A man accused of plotting a terrorist bomb attack in the UK has appeared in court charged with inciting an atrocity in Germany.

Fatah Mohammed Abdullah, 33, was arrested in December last year after he allegedly bought “explosive pre-cursors” online.

Last week, he was charged with inciting two people to commit a terror attack in Germany following a joint investigation between UK and German police.

Abdullah is said to have provided assistance and encouragement to the pair in messages using the encrypted Telegram app.

The charge, under Section 59 of the Terrorism Act 2000, states that he incited another person to drive a car into crowds, attack people with a meat cleaver, and set off bombs outside the UK between April 9 and December 11 last year.

Abdullah appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court via video-link from Belmarsh prison on Wednesday, speaking only to confirm his name, address, date of birth and that he is a British Iranian.

Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram sent the case to the Old Bailey, where Abdullah will next appear on March 1.

He is also charged with preparing an act of terrorism between April 9 and December 11 last year contrary to Section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006.

The charge states that he bought a knife and a balaclava as well as “explosive pre-cursors”, and compiled instructions on how to make gunpowder.

Abdullah also searched online for guides on how to make explosives and for the remaining components to make an improvised explosive device (IED), such as a pressure cooker and nails, it is claimed.

Abdullah, from Arthur’s Hill in Newcastle upon Tyne, is yet to enter pleas and was remanded in custody.

Leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) have been rebuked for belittling the significance of the Nazis and criticizing a Holocaust memorial, but this has not stopped a small group of Jews from throwing their support behind the party.

On Sunday they formed Jews in the AfD, a political group based in the western city of Wiesbaden that seeks to foster support for the party, which says Islam is not compatible with the German constitution.

“We are not a religious organisation, we are a political organisation,” Jews in the AfD leader Wolfgang Fuhl told reporters at the inauguration ceremony, sitting on a podium with fellow Jews including a few wearing the Jewish skullcap.

He said people wishing to join had to meet two requirements: membership in the AfD and ethnic or religious association with the Jewish faith. Twenty people signed up at Sunday’s meeting.

The AfD entered the German parliament for the first time in an election last year, drawing support from a broad array of voters angry with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to welcome almost a million, mainly Muslim asylum seekers.

Its success drew immediate expressions of concern from Israeli officials and Jewish groups in Europe and the United States.

German politicians in June rebuked AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland after he said that Hitler and the Nazis “are just bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history.”

And Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, triggered anger last year after he told supporters that Berlin’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was a “memorial of shame” and that history books should be rewritten to focus more on German victims.

But Jews for AfD leader Fuhl dismissed those concerns on Sunday, saying the AfD was the most pro-Israel party in Germany, not least because it supports the Jewish state’s right to have all of Jerusalem as its capital.

‘PRO-ISRAEL’

“The AfD is an exceptionally pro-Israel party, supposedly the most pro-Israel party in the Bundestag,” Fuhl said, referring to the lower house of parliament in which the AfD is the third-largest party.

Palestinians, with broad international backing, seek East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they want to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Israel regards all of the city, including the eastern sector it captured in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed, as its “eternal and indivisible capital”.

Germany, home to an estimated 200,000 Jews, has built a reputation in recent decades as a tolerant, safe place for Jews to live. The rise of the AfD has alarmed the community.

Anti-Semitic crimes reported to the police rose 4 percent to 681 in the first eight months of 2017 against the same period last year, with an overwhelming majority of incidents linked to far-right extremism. The real number is probably much higher.

Members of Jews in the AfD appear unmoved by those figures.

When asked by a journalist what he would say to people who might call him a “Nazi Jew,” Bernhard Krauskopf said speaking in English: “I tell them that ‘you are talking to a Jewish-German person whose father lost more than 50 people in Nazi death camps, you should be a little bit more intelligent not to talk such nonsense.'”

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he was sceptical.

“It doesn’t go together for me,” he told Reuters. “In the end, I have to assume that these are people who simply have not recognised the true ulterior motive, also the goals of this more than right-wing populist party.”

He added: “I think that there are some who think, ‘The AFD is a party that today predominantly campaigns against or targets refugees, migrants, Muslims’. However, I consider it completely wrong to put Muslims under general suspicion. And the formula ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ does not work.'”