LEAD: Police arrest man accused of helping German neo-Nazi murderers

Feb 1, 2012, 14:16 GMT

Berlin - German police investigating a neo-Nazi terrorist gang arrested a 31-year-old man on Wednesday on charges of being an accessory to murder, federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe said.

Germany had earlier detained the sole survivor of the three-person gang, Beate Zschaepe, 36, and four of her suspected supporters. The fifth, only named as Carsten S, is alleged to have supplied the self-styled National Socialist Underground (NSU) with a gun and ammunition.

The arrest speeds up the pace of an inquiry that has been criticized for being too slow. Police only discovered in November that the racist gang had been behind 10 unsolved murders since 2000, killing eight Turkish shopkeepers, a Greek man and a policewoman.

Zschaepe's two male accomplices died in November in an apparent suicide pact before they could be arrested.

Heavily armed federal police raided S' home in the western city of Dusseldorf and took him into custody. His full surname has been withheld under the German media's privacy guidelines.

Investigators say S was active in 1999 and 2000 in the Thuringia Home Guard, a group of neo-Nazi militants from which the NSU evolved.

Last week, S admitted via his lawyer to reporters that he had been a member of the far-right home guard, but claimed he had repented of his far-right views.

'Since then, I have despised every form of right-wing, racist and extremist ideology,' he asserted in the statement.

Prosecutors doubt that. He is alleged to have bought the gun and bullets in 2001 or 2002 and used a go-between to send them to the gang, and to have been a backer of the trio until 2003.

He is suspected of being an accessory to six murders and one attempted murder, though prosecutors said they had no evidence the gun was used in the murders. But they said giving any gun to the gang had meant encouraging its use for a far-right crime.