Beate Zschäpe is accused of involvement in multiple racially motivated murders, nail bombings and armed robberies
The surviving member of an underground neo-Nazi cell and four men alleged to have been her accomplices have gone on trial amid tight security in the biggest terrorist court case Germany has staged for decades.
Beate Zschäpe appeared calm and confident as she stepped into Munich's main regional court shortly after 10am, flanked by police. She is accused of complicity in 10 racially motivated murders, two nail bombings, which injured 23 people, and 15 armed bank robberies, which took place over a decade across Germany.
Dressed in a smart black suit and wearing large, hooped earrings, the 38-year-old folded her arms and smiled, turning her back to the cameras as she took her place in room 101, where the case is expected to take up to two years to be tried.
In the dock as much as Zschäpe and the alleged accomplices are Germany's security services, which for years failed to make the link between the far right and the killings, of eight Turks, a Greek and a German policewoman. They are likely to be as much under scrutiny in Munich as Germany's murky neo-Nazi fringe.
Zschäpe is the only surviving member of the so-called National Socialist Underground (NSU), her fellow members, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, having killed themselves after a botched bank raid in November 2011. She has pledged to remain silent throughout the trial, a tactic that is likely to make the prosecution's case much harder and the trial much longer.
Zschäpe gave herself up to police four days after Mundlos and Böhnhardt killed themselves. She allegedly set fire to the flat the three shared in Zwickau, in Saxony. Her four fellow defendants, all believed to have been members of the neo-Nazi underground scene, are charged with aiding and abetting the NSU murders by providing the three with weapons, money and documentation.
Outside the court, anti-racist demonstrators protested, while members of the Turkish community held up posters of the victims. Semiya Simsek, the daughter of Enver Simsek, a shepherd's son from the Taurus mountains in southern Turkey who was the NSU's first victim, expressed her relief that the case was finally starting after 13 years and long delays.
Stephan Lucas, her lawyer, said: "She is happy that the trial is finally beginning, but everything she has been through is being brought up again and it's very painful for her." .
One group released hundreds of black helium balloons into the Munich skies to commemorate the NSU's victims, while others laid large black wreaths outside the courtroom.
The trial was delayed for three weeks when Germany's supreme court ordered a reorganisation of the allocation of the 50 media seats after no Turkish media were granted places. Many major German media organisations were later excluded because of a lack of space after Munich's judicial authorities refused either to relocate the trial or to erect a video link to enable more journalists to watch it from another room.
The trial was interrupted shortly after it began when the three lawyers representing Zschäpe lodged a complaint with the judge, Manfred Götzl, over a decision to search them, but not state prosecutors or police, for weapons on entering the courtroom.
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