A Death that Preys on Germany's Guilt

By Toby Helm in Sebnitz

A WEEK after the drowning of a half-Iraqi boy was seized on by the German press as a neo-Nazi murder, serious doubts have been raised about the veracity of the evidence.

Joseph Abdulla, a six-year-old boy from the market town of Sebnitz in south-east Germany, drowned during a visit with his elder sister to a public swimming pool on Friday June 13, 1997. Almost a year later the cause of death was officially given as "drowning while playing in the water".

In the past fortnight, however, new "evidence" has been produced by Joseph's German mother and Iraqi father suggesting something far more sinister.

Having gathered 15 witness statements during an inquiry that cost them more than £60,000, the parents allege that Joseph was grabbed from the poolside by up to 50 racists, forced to drink a sedative, beaten up and deliberately trampled on in the water while townspeople looked on.

Suddenly Sebnitz was in the national spotlight. Had the local police assisted in a cover-up? Did the town hold a terrible secret that was about to come out? "Something certainly happened in there," says Ingrid Mucklisch, a postal worker, glancing towards the pool. "It wasn't a simple accident. Someone knows what went on. The police never investigated fully." The parents' claims have struck the rawest of nerves. Only two months before, after a series of incidents involving foreigners, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (right, with friends) urged all Germans to rise up against far-Right extremism. It was time, he said, for people to stop turning a blind eye to these skinhead thugs. The country's reputation - and its attractiveness to investors - were at stake.

Eight days ago Germany's mass circulation newspaper Bild responded to the plea with vigour. Neo-Nazis had murdered Joseph, it announced. As a result of the parent's investigation, three young people had been arrested on suspicion of causing his death. A heart-wrenching picture of Joseph's mother stroking her dead child was printed across the paper's front page.

Bild was prepared to tell the truth even if the people of Sebnitz were not.

More details spilled out. A second autopsy, paid for by the parents, found bruises on Joseph's left ear that had been ignored in previous inquiries.

Traces of ritalin, a drug used to calm hyperactive children, were detected.

One of the three arrested was a daughter of the owner of another chemist's shop in Sebnitz in competition with the Abdulla's. Where had the ritalin come from? Most German papers faithfully followed the story next day.

Sebnitz was condemned. In an outpouring of uniquely German angst, politicians piled in to express their outrage.

On Monday Mr Schröder met Joseph's mother in a show of solidarity. The same day, however, the story suddenly, and dramatically, changed course. The three suspects, two young men and a young women, were unexpectedly released from custody. The statements of the witnesses who named the three people were contradictory, said prosecutors, and large parts of them were subsequently withdrawn.

Moreover, it emerged that witnesses had been given small sums of money by the family in return for making statements. By Thursday Mrs Kantelberg-Abdulla, Joseph's mother, was being investigated by police for encouraging false accusations and even Bild was questioning her reliability.

It is not the first time Germany has prematurely blamed neo-Nazis for incidents. A summer frenzy of outrage about the far Right that led to a government move this month to ban the extremist National Democrat Party (NPD) began with a bomb attack in Dusseldorf blamed at the time on racist Right-wingers.

Six of nine casualties were Jewish. There was understandable dismay. But subsequently - after the headlines left the papers - there turned out to be no firm evidence that the far Right had been involved. Sebnitz's mayor, Mike Ruckh, is angry. He said: "It is unbelievable how the media have behaved here. They have accused us, tried us and convicted us.

"They told everyone that our police did not investigate properly, but in fact it is they who did not do their investigations." He accepts that the town has a problem with neo-Nazi skinheads. In the last election the NPD won 6.5 per cent of the vote, giving it a seat on the town council. But he does not accept that his town deserves a reputation as a den of racist violence.

On the streets of Sebnitz many doubts persist about Joseph's case. Ilona Mohring, a young mother who works near the swimming pool, remembers walking past the pool's entrance the morning after he died. "I saw signs against the wall, written in children's handwriting. One said, 'You are killers. You have murdered Joseph'. There were also candles.

"But then when I came back in the afternoon everything had gone. People just wanted to cover up what happened." But Stefanie Kirchner, a 16-year-old schoolgirl who was at the pool on the day, suspects it was a pure accident.

She said: "There were no neo-Nazis there, none at all." After a week in which the case became a national obsession, most people now accept that neo-Nazis were probably not involved. But it is a measure of Germany's sensitivity about its history that so many people leapt so swiftly to the opposite conclusion a week ago.

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