German police file charges against far-right leader

BERLIN, Aug 24 (Reuters) German police have charged the leader of a far-right political party with inciting racial hatred after he recommended Adolf Hitler's former deputy for the Nobel peace prize.

Police in the eastern city of Jena said today they had filed the charge against Udo Voigt, head of the National Democratic Party (NPD), after he proposed the late Rudolf Hess for the prestigious award during a speech last weekend.

If convicted of incitement, Voigt could face a jail term of up to three years or a fine, police said.

Voigt made the comment in Jena last Saturday as he marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Hess.

That evening, a mob of 50 attacked and chased eight Indian men through the town of Muegeln, east of Jena.

Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the Muegeln attack, which has prompted a fresh round of soul-searching in Germany about far-right violence, and renewed calls for action against it.

Far-right attacks have been a recurring problem in the poorer eastern states of Germany since reunification in 1990.

The NPD has no seats in Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, but is represented in the legislatures of two eastern states, Saxony and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Members of the NPD in Saxony's state parliament provoked outrage in 2005 by walking out of a commemoration for the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp and calling the Allied air raids on Dresden in 1945 a ''bombing holocaust''.

Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials and died in Spandau prison in 1987.

REUTERS PD HS1640