Defendant Beate Zschaepe stands with her lawyers Wolfgang Stahl and Wolfgang Heer (right) before her trial yesterday in a courtroom in Munich.

DPA/Berlin

Clues overlooked by police were in focus yesterday ahead of a summer recess in Germany’s trial of racially motivated killings, allegedly by two neo-Nazis who later killed themselves.
Eight Turkish shopkeepers, a Greek man and a German policewoman were fatally shot in the head at close range between 2000 and 2007, most of them with the same pistol, according to ballistics experts.
Witnesses described seeing a pair of male cyclists at many of the crime scenes, but detectives failed to connect them to the attacks.
In hindsight, the cyclists appear to have been the two gunmen, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, making their getaway after each shooting.
A detective told the Munich court yesterday that a witness had spoken of seeing two cyclists just before the shooting death of Ismail Yasar, a Turkish vendor of doner kebab snacks, in his Nuremberg shop on June 9, 2005.
Moments later as the witness drove past Yasar’s booth, she again saw the two.
One of the men came out and put something in a yellow plastic bag in the other man’s backpack, she told the police.
The detective said four witnesses had seen the assailants come and go, including a van driver who was annoyed at how slowly they were riding in front of him.
Shortly afterwards, he had heard several shots.
The trial of Beate Zschaepe, 38, who is said to be the sole surviving member of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) cell, began three months ago and is scheduled to continue through next year.
Prosecutors have charged her as an accomplice to the killings.
Separate government inquiries have been mounted into why the police and intelligence agencies misread the killings, failing to spot the neo-Nazi motive and instead suspecting organised crime.
The trial is set to resume on September 5.
One of Zschaepe’s lawyers, Anja Sturm, dashed any hope that Zschaepe would end her silence and illuminate her relationship with the gunmen, who died in what appears to have been a murder-suicide in 2011.
In an interview from outside the court with ZDF television, Sturm indicated the defence will argue that Zschaepe was not a full and equal member of the trio, which went underground in about 1998.
There was no change in the defence strategy of Zschaepe not taking the stand, which Sturm called “absolutely right and appropriate”.
Four men are also on trial, accused of helping the NSU from outside.
Only one has agreed to testify, describing how he supplied the trio with the gun.
Police have introduced detailed evidence from the interrogation of a second man who admitted lending the trio his identity papers, but he has refused to repeat this live to the court.