Bombs, deaths and national soul searching

Most of the victims were immigrants and their deaths at first failed to make headlines.

Police were quick to blame the slayings on foreign gangs with links to gambling and drugs.

But revelations that a string of unsolved killings may have been a cold-blooded neo-Nazi campaign against ethnic Turks have shaken the nation, forcing Germans to confront painful truths about racism and the broader treatment of immigrants in a society deeply conscious of the lasting legacy of the Holocaust.