Since December, when Islamic terrorist Anis Amri drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, Germans have been waiting fearfully for the next Islamist attack. However right-wing terrorism is also a growing concern in Germany, and the latest case to come to light shows how this extremist movement may be evolving. Germany’s Military Intelligence is currently investigating 275 cases of right-wing extremism, but surely none of them is quite so disconcerting as the peculiar case of Franco A.
The investigation began in January, when a maintenance worker at Vienna Airport opened a toilet ventilation duct and found a pistol hidden inside it. The police attached an alarm to the air duct, in February a man set off the alarm, and was duly arrested. That man was a 28 year-old German soldier, a first lieutenant called Franco A.
Franco A told the Austrian police he’d found the pistol in the gardens at an officers ball he’d attended in Vienna.
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