TEHRAN German prosecutors have reopened the case of a six-year-old, half-Iraqi boy drowned in a crowded swimming pool after witnesses said he was tortured and murdered because of his ethnicity, media reported Friday.
The case has drawn enormous press attention, with newspapers printing giant photos of the half-Iraqi, half-German boy named Josef, as the country searches for ways to combat a rising tide of far-right racist violence.
Josef drowned in a public swimming pool in the eastern town of Sebnitz three years ago under suspicious circumstances.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper said the pool was "packed with more than 200 onlookers who did nothing to save the helpless child" in the drowning on June 13, 1997.
The city of Dresden Chief Prosecutor, Claus Bogner, said that three people, two men and a woman in their twenties, have been questioned this week in the case, the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper reported.
Bogner said all three, one of whom has links to the neo-Nazi scene, are suspects in the possible murder, but he said that authorities are not yet calling the case a possible hate crime.
The Tagesspiegel reported the Bogner confirmed the case had been reopened in September based on new accounts of the death.
The mother of the boy, Renate Abdulla-Kantelbach, said she had never accepted that her son's death was an accident.
Abdulla-Kantelbach, 48, who runs a pharmacy in Sebnitz with her Iraqi husband, told the German news agency DPA that she had received letters from 15 witnesses who had tried to help Joseph at the scene of the incident on June 13, 1997.
According to their statements, Joseph was tortured with an electric shock instrument and thrown in the water and held under until he drowned by more than a group of a dozen people.
"I have always assumed that he was murdered," she said.
Abdulla-Kantelbach said that her suspicions were heightened when, after an autopsy, traces of the sedative ritalin were found her Josef's blood.
Ritalin is popular as a narcotic in the neo-Nazi scene.
According to police figures, there were 11,000 extreme right-wing criminal offenses in Germany in the first 10 months of the year.
Police forces were on the alert and counter-demonstrators mobilized as racist moves mounted in Germany.
More than 1,000 supporters of a neo-Nazi party that the German government wants banned demonstrated in central Berlin on Saturday.
Shortly before the scheduled midday (1100 GMT) start of the march by the National Democratic Party (NPD), police reported one NPD member wounded and hospitalized after a scuffle with left-wingers.
Some 4,000 police officers were standing by to prevent further violence at the demonstration by the NPD, which had announced the participation of 1,500 of its members from all over the country.
A counter-demonstration was also being held by an alliance called "Europe Without Racism". Police put the number of NPD supporters at 1,100 and the number of counter-demonstrators at 900.
Under an agreement with the Berlin authorities, who have done their best to hinder the neo-Nazis' demonstration, the NPD was not marching through the Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of German national unity.
Instead, its supporters were scheduled to go from a main rail station in East Berlin via the large Alexanderplatz to the busy shopping area of Friedrichstrasse.
The authorities want to prevent extremist groups such as the NPD from demonstrating at politically-sensitive sites, but the NPD was still expected to pass via a prominent war memorial, the so-called "Neue Wache".
The counter-demonstration was held nearby in front of Berlin's city hall and was due to be addressed by the speaker of the German Parliament, Wolfgang Thierse.
Both the center-left government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the Upper House of Parliament, the Bundesrat, have resolved to formally ask the constitutional court to outlaw the NPD.
The party, said to have a total membership of about 6,000, is accused of fomenting a wave of racist violence against foreigners and other minorities which has alarmed mainstream political leaders.