German police have arrested two men and a woman suspected of drowning a six-year old boy in a public swimming pool three years ago motivated by racial hatred.
The six-year old boy, Joseph Kantelberg-Abdulla, was beaten, electrocuted and drugged by a gang of 50 neo-Nazis before being drowned in the pool.
None of the 300 people at the pool that day intervened to stop the attack and no one interviewed later by police mentioned the neoNazi gang, a report in Germany's Bild newspaper said yesterday.
The attack in June 1997 in the eastern village of Sebnitz, near the Czech border, was attributed to accidental drowning and the investigation was closed.
Last year the parents of the dead boy were approached by a witness to the attack, who told them how the neo-Nazi gang beat their son, shouting "Scheiss-Auslander" ("f***ing/bloody foreigner") and forced him to drink from a cup before they drowned him.
The boy's Iraq-born father and German mother paid DM10,000 (£4,000) to have their son's body exhumed and examined by a second coroner. Several of the boy's internal organs were missing and traces of the drug Ritalin, used to treat hyperactive children, were found in his bloodstream. The boy's mother then went from door to door, interviewing people at the pool on the day of the attack. Several told her of the neo-Nazi attack and yesterday Bild printed their chilling eye-witness accounts.
"The two leaders of the group hit him in the stomach and boxed his ears. Joseph was dazed, his head hung to one side. The older of the two gave Joseph a shock on the stomach with an electric stunner. Joseph couldn't talk properly anymore," said one witness.
The 23-year-old went on to tell how something was mixed in a drink which a woman forced into the boy's mouth, being held open by the two men.
"The two men . . . threw a towel over him and dragged him to the pool. They threw him into the deep end and hopped in after him. Joseph didn't move and lay on the pool floor," said a second witness.
The horrific incident is just the latest in a catalogue of hate crimes concentrated in eastern Germany. Neo-Nazi gangs have declared whole towns in eastern states "national liberated zones", places where police say they cannot guarantee the safety of foreigners, the handicapped or homosexuals.
The town of Sebnitz has a large neo-Nazi gang who call themselves the "Swiss-Saxon Skinheads" and a member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) sits on the town council.
The federal government in Berlin is attempting to ban the NPD, a party with "Nazi characteristics" that the government says is responsible for the majority of racially-motivated attacks that have shocked Germany this year.
