BERLIN: The head of the domestic intelligence agency in the German capital said on Wednesday she was stepping down after it emerged that key files on the neo-Nazi scene were shredded on her watch.
Claudia Schmid, who had held the job at the Berlin division of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution since 2001, handed in her resignation to the city-state's top security official, Frank Henkel.
"Ms Schmid asked me to be reassigned. She wants to clear the way for a managed fresh start," he told the intelligence committee of the state legislature. "I agreed to this request."
She is the fifth top official in Germany's domestic intelligence service to step aside since it emerged last November that a shadowy neo-Nazi group was likely behind a rash of killings of immigrant shopkeepers.
A trio that called itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU) has been blamed for 10 murders between 2000 and 2007. Last week federal prosecutors brought charges against its only known surviving member, Beate Zschaepe.
The case broke open only when two members of the NSU were found dead in an apparent suicide pact and the other, Zschaepe, turned herself in after setting the apartment they shared ablaze.
Berlin authorities recently admitted that files on right-wing extremists were illegally shredded in 2010 and earlier this year, with documents possibly related to alleged NSU accomplices among those destroyed.
"I do not believe the worst. I still believe it was human error," Henkel was quoted by local news agency DPA as saying. "But even a series of mistakes creates a disastrous impression."
He said the security services owed it to the NSU's victims to get to the bottom of the matter and make necessary changes.
Schmid will exit along with Berlin's head of the division for right-wing extremism. Henkel said he aimed to launch a fundamental reform of the Berlin agency.
And at a separate event Wednesday, the heads of the national Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Crime Office pledged to step up their cooperation in fighting far-right violence with the help of a new anti-terror centre in the western city of Cologne.
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