[citation needed] The police discovered an alleged hit list of 88 names that included "two prominent members of the Bundestag and representatives of Turkish and Islamic groups".

[5] As the right-wing connection with these crimes began to be investigated, it was discovered that sectors of German intelligence could have had links with the NSU and had prior knowledge of the nature of the killings.

They engaged in street fights with an anti-fascist group, attended far-right concerts, and even wore home-made SS uniforms to the former Buchenwald concentration camp.

When asked about a link between the crime and neo-Nazis, the chief investigator of the Munich Murder Commission, Josef Wilfling, responded "Have you ever seen a Nazi on a bike?

When his employee running the stall in Nuremberg went on holiday, Şimşek himself stepped in for him, and in the afternoon of 9 September 2000, he was shot in the face by two gunmen and died from his wounds in hospital two days later.

[15] Two and a half years later, in Rostock-Toitenwinkel, on the morning of Ash Wednesday, 25 February 2004, between 10:10 and 10:20,[16] Mehmet Turgut was shot three times in the head and neck with a silenced CZ 83 and died instantaneously.

Because of Turgut's link to Hamburg, Rostock police made the connection to the third victim, Süleyman Taşköprü, thus establishing the term döner murders.

[19] In Dortmund, in the early afternoon of 4 April 2006, kiosk vendor Mehmet Kubaşık, a German citizen of Turkish origin, was found dead in his shop.

Both were shot involving directly aimed headshots at point-blank range while sitting in the patrol car with the shooters approaching their vehicle from both sides.

The duty pistols of Kiesewetter and her partner were found on 4 November 2011 at the caravan where Böhnhardt and Mundlos died, giving rise to the belief that this attack was linked to the Bosphorus murder series.

[24] In November 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that "the cold-blooded murders of nine immigrant shopkeepers by Neo-Nazis is an inconceivable crime for Germany and a national disgrace".

[25] In January 2012, the term "Döner-Morde" (English: Kebab Murders) was named the German Un-Word of the Year for 2011 by a jury of linguistic scholars, who considered its usage as inappropriate and inhuman.

[26] On 4 November 2016, following the recent meetings in the German parliament on the topic; Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ of Turkey openly criticized Germany's handling of the inexcusable hatred crimes against people of non-German origin, mainly Turks.

At this time, a video began circulating amongst German media in which the cartoon character the Pink Panther linked all of the unsolved crimes to the neo-Nazi group Zschäpe, Mundlos, and Böhnhardt founded named the National Socialist Underground.

"[8] One of the more controversial subjects to come to light during the NSU murder trial is the level of cooperation and support that neo-Nazi informants and organizations receive from the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic security agency.

The BfV began cultivating informants from Germany's neo-Nazi groups in the early and mid-1990s to deal with the rise in anti-immigrant crime like the Rostock-Lichtenhagen riots of 1992.

[30] In December 2018, five German police officers were suspended from their posts after Seda Basay-Yildiz, a Turkish-German lawyer who had defended the family of one of the victims of the NSU, was faxed a death threat against her two-year-old daughter.

The phones of the police officers who were on duty at the moment were confiscated, and it was found that many were exchanging racist and far-right messages in a group chat,[31] and posting pictures of Hitler and swastikas.

[32] A few months before, a scandal broke out when it was discovered that special forces officers used "Uwe Böhnhardt" (after one of the NSU murderers) as a codename during a visit of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

[33] Until 2011 German police and intelligence services denied the racist motivation of the murders and instead treated immigrant families as suspects,[33] accusing the victims of being involved in the drug trade and their relatives of withholding information that could help solve the crimes.

[36] According to Amnesty International, families of the victims, and minority communities as a whole, became the target of police suspicions "despite the absence of reasonable grounds for believing that they are involved in the crimes.

"[35] Relatives of the victims submitted a report to the United Nations, accusing the Bavarian police of mishandling the case due to systemic racism.

[8] On 11 July 2018 Beate Zschäpe was found guilty of ten counts of murder, membership in a terror organization and arson, and sentenced to life imprisonment.