German police have made a further arrest in the case of three neo-Nazis suspected of killing nine immigrant shopkeepers and a policewoman in a case that has shaken the country.
The neo-Nazi trio are suspected of shooting the eight Turkish and one Greek shopkeepers in a string of unsolved hate crimes that lasted from 2000 to 2006 and became known as the "kebab murders".
Police said on Friday they were investigating a 36-year-old woman for murder, membership of a terrorist group and arson.
The two male suspects with whom she lived were found dead earlier in the week in a burning camper van in Eisenach, eastern Germany, and are thought to have shot themselves after a failed bank robbery.
The 37-year-old man arrested on Sunday is being investigated for his potential involvement in the murders.
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He is also suspected, like the others, of being a member of the National Socialist Underground (NSU). According to investigators he had been in contact with the trio since the 1990s and had given them his driver's licence in 2007 and his passport around four months ago.
He is also thought to have rented camper vans for them, one of which was used in the 2007 attack on police in which one policewoman died and one policeman was injured.
The murders, the longest wave of right-wing violence in Germany since World War II, have caused politicians to talk of "right-wing terrorism".
"It looks as if ... we're actually having to deal with a new form of extreme right-wing terrorism," said Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich on Sunday.
"It's an extraordinary event that has to be looked into with great diligence," said Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany demanded that a "new determination" be found in the fight against right-wing extremism and that the far-right National Democratic Party (NDP) be banned.
"Unfortunately there is still no real debate about racism and racist terror in Germany," the chairman of the activist group Turkish Community in Germany (TGD), Kenan Kolat, told ARD television.
In a further twist, the role of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has also come into the spotlight as politicians have questioned why the group, which was known to the authorities before they disappeared in 1998, was not found before.
According to information obtained from security sources by the tabloid Bild newspaper to be published on Monday, police found suspicious documents in the trio's home in the eastern German city of Zwickau.
Security sources were speculating that the group had been given new identities and used as spies in the right-wing scene.
"Usually only undercover investigators, who are working for the intelligence service would be given such papers," Hans-Peter Uhl, the interior policy spokesman for the conservative CDU/CSU grouping in parliament, told the paper.
"I can't confirm that," said Friedrich of the speculation.
However, he added: "Alone the fact that these people haven't caught anybody's attention, even in checks, since 1998 suggests that these are either perfect fakes or real papers."
