Police shoot AfD councillor ‘plotting Nazi-inspired coup’

A local councillor for the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was shot in the jaw on Tuesday when police tried to arrest him over an alleged plot to mount a Nazi-inspired coup.

Kurt Hättasch, a councillor in the town of Grimma in Saxony, was operated on in hospital after sustaining a gunshot wound during an early-morning raid.

The councillor confronted police with a gun, leading to an officer firing two warning shots.

Mr Hättasch’s injuries are not said to be life threatening and an investigation is under way into the circumstances of the injury.

The AfDpolitician was one of eight men arrested as part of an investigation into an alleged neo-Nazi terror cell.

Federal prosecutors say that the men, all in their early twenties, formed a group called the “Saxonian Separatists”, who had allegedly made military preparations for the collapse of society.

The men set up their organisation in late 2020 in the expectation that German society would fall apart in a so-called “Day X”, the prosecution service said.

Members engaged in weapons training and planned to seize control of parts of east Germany, which they allegedly wanted to ethnically cleanse of “undesirable groups of people”.

They stocked up on military equipment including camouflage suits, combat helmets, gas masks and protective waistcoats, the prosecution added, and were “inspired by National Socialism”.

Two further suspects in the case are members of the AfD, though not serving politicians, according to a report by the political magazine Der Spiegel.

The eight suspects have been named as Kurt H, Karl K, Kevin M, Hans-Georg P, Kevin R, Jörg S, Jörn S and Norman T.

AfD’s local chapter in Saxony, which German intelligence agencies describe as extremist, has distanced itself from the suspects.

“We only know about this incident from the press reports. Our party stands firmly on the ground of the free democratic order,” Andreas Harlass, an AfD spokesman, told the German Press Agency.

German police have uncovered several prepper cells in recent years.

The groups are often characterised by bizarre, esoteric belief systems and fantasise about reinstating an aristocratic system similar to the Kaiser era.

In one case, an elderly woman was accused of being the ringleader of a terror cell plotting a monarchist revolution.

The cell allegedly wanted to kidnap the country’s health minister and attack the electricity grid to spark a civil war and restore the Prussian monarchy.

In a separate trial, a minor aristocrat who is said to have been obsessed with QAnon-style conspiracy theories, had made plans to storm the German parliament and install himself as head of a new government.

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