BERLIN (Reuters) – A German man has been charged with murder and attempted murder more than three decades after he allegedly set fire to a shelter for asylum seekers in western Germany amid a series of attacks on foreigners in the early 1990s.
The federal prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday it had filed the indictment against the man, identified only as Peter S under German privacy laws, which also included charges of arson.
He was detained in early April and has been held in custody since, the office said in a statement.
Reuters was unable to contact the man because of the privacy laws that protect the identity of the accused.
Investigators say the accused entered the shelter in the town of Saarlouis, near the French border, in the early hours of Sept. 19, 1991, before dousing the stairwell with gasoline and setting it alight.
A 27-year-old Ghanaian man was engulfed by the flames and died that day of his injuries.
Two other residents leapt from a window to flee the blaze and suffered broken bones as a result, the prosecutor’s office said, adding that the other 18 residents had escaped unharmed.
The statement said the accused had met the evening before with “right-wing extremist comrades” in a pub in the eastern town of Hoyerswerda, as xenophobic riots were building there.
Those riots took place between Sept. 17 and Sept. 23 and culminated in the evacuation of Vietnamese and Mozambican guest workers from a besieged apartment block in the town.
Similar acts of violent against foreigners followed, including riots in the city of Rostock in northern Germany in 1992 and a fatal arson attack in the western city of Solingen in 1993.
(Reporting by Rachel More, Editing by Miranda Murray and Tomasz Janowski)
