Germany will hold a memorial service for the victims of a neo-Nazi murder spree, the president of the country's parliament said Sunday, as a minister vowed to compensate the families of those killed.
The Bundestag lower house of parliament has held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff over the most appropriate way to remember the murder victims, parliament chief Norbert Lammert said.
"We are all agreed that there should be an event," he told Sunday's edition of the Tagesspiegel. "How such a commemoration should take place depends on the views and expectations of the victims' families," he added. Germans have been shocked at the recent discovery of a small far-right group believed responsible for the unsolved murders of eight men of Turkish origin and a Greek between 2000 and 2006 as well as a policewoman in 2007.
The killings had long been called the "kebab murders" because some victims ran snack shops.
Investigators now think the same group may have been behind the 2004 bombing in a district of Cologne where many Turkish immigrants lived, which left 20 people wounded.
Senior Turkish politicians have made clear that they want answers. "As they were killed by racism, because they were Turks, we consider them as martyrs," Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Saturday according to reports in the Turkish press.
He said he would follow the case right to the end to get justice for the victims. Turkish President Abdullah Gul, pressed by journalists to respond to the revelations, made it clear he was confident Germany would discover what really happened, Anatolia news agency reported.
Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger promised compensation to loved ones and said she was concerned that a probe into neo-Nazi violence might reveal more crimes.