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NAZI

Nazis suspected of political arson attacks

Police suspect Swedish neo-Nazi groups of burning down a Stockholm cultural centre and setting fire to an apartment occupied by a young family in two separate arson attacks in the last week.

Nazis suspected of political arson attacks

In both cases, the perpetrators are thought to have deliberately targeted people affiliated with the Syndikalist trade union.

On Saturday evening, the Cyklopen social centre in the Högdalen suburb burned to the ground in what police believe was a deliberate attack. The fire broke out at the same time an anti-racist group was scheduled to meet at the centre, though the meeting had been cancelled a few days earlier.

Two nights later, a couple and their young child were forced to evacuate their Högdalen apartment after flammable liquid was poured through their letterbox and the premises set on fire, Dagens Nyheter reports.

The father, 27, and mother, 24, fled to the balcony as the apartment became engulfed in flames. They managed to pass their 2-year-old daughter down to their neighbour one floor below before hoisting themselves over over the balcony to safety.

“We are working on the theory that Nazis were behind this,” police investigator Christer Söderheim told the newspaper.

With both parents active in the Syndikalist movement, Söderheim said he believed the two recent attacks were linked.

The events of the last few days come nine years after Syndikalist Björn Söderberg was murdered by two Nazis outside his front door in the Stockholm suburb Sätra.

Swedish security police Säpo said it was not unusual for clashes to intensify in the period leading up to December 6th, when Swedish neo-Nazis stage an annual march in the small town of Salem to mark the violent death in 2001 of 17-year-old white power advocate Daniel Wretström.

“It’s more intense this year than ever before,” Säpo spokesman Johan Olsson told Svenska Dagbladet.

NAZI

Austrian rapper arrested over neo-Nazi songs

Austrian authorities said Tuesday they have arrested a rapper accused of broadcasting neo-Nazi songs, one of which was used by the man behind a deadly anti-Semitic attack in Germany.

Austrian rapper arrested over neo-Nazi songs
Austrian police officers patrol at the house where Adolf Hitler was born during the anti-Nazi protest in Braunau Am Inn, Austria on April 18, 2015. Photo: JOE KLAMAR / AFP

“The suspect has been arrested on orders of the Vienna prosecutors” and transferred to prison after a search of his home, said an interior ministry statement.

Police seized a mixing desk, hard discs, weapons, a military flag from the Third Reich era and other Nazi objects during their search.

Austrian intelligence officers had been trying for months to unmask the rapper, who went by the pseudonym Mr Bond and had been posting to neo-Nazi forums since 2016.

The suspect, who comes from the southern region of Carinthia, has been detained for allegedly producing and broadcasting Nazi ideas and incitement to hatred.

“The words of his songs glorify National Socialism (Nazism) and are anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic,” said the interior ministry statement.

One of his tracks was used as the sound track during the October 2019 attack outside a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle.

In posts to online forums based in the United States, the rapper compared the man behind the 2019 Christchurch shootings that killed 51 people at a New Zealand mosque to a saint, and translated his racist manifesto into German.

Last September, an investigation by Austrian daily Der Standard and Germany's public broadcaster ARD said that the musician had been calling on members of neo-Nazi online forums and chat groups to carry out terrorist attacks for several years.

They also reported that his music was used as the soundtrack to the live-streamed attack in Halle, when a man shot dead two people after a failed attempt to storm the synagogue.

During his trial last year for the attack, 28-year-old Stephan Balliet said he had picked the music as a “commentary on the act”. In December, a German court jailed him for life.

“The fight against far-right extremism is our historical responsibility,” Austria's Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said Tuesday.

Promoting Nazi ideology is a criminal offence in Austria, which was the birth place of Adolph Hitler.

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