Nazi gang brands teenage girl

A neo-Nazi gang carved a swastika on a 17-year-old German girl’s skin after she tried to stop them taunting a young refugee.

Police said she tried to help a six-year-old girl from the former Soviet Union who was being harassed by the group in the eastern town of Mittweida.

The four suspects threw the teenager on the ground and three of them pressed her down while the fourth one carved a swastika on her hip with a scalpel-like knife.

The identities of the suspects and the two girls were not revealed, and there have been no arrests.

One 19-year-old suspect was briefly detained, then released, police said.

In the eastern German town of Cottbus, meanwhile, a court convicted a far-right political activist of using the stiff-armed Nazi salute, which is banned in Germany, and sentenced him to six months in prison.

During the trial, 71-year-old former lawyer Horst Mahler, a strategist for the far-right National Democratic Party, confessed to giving the Nazi salute when he reported to prison a year ago after a conviction in a separate case.

He has appeared in court frequently over the years, and this was his fifth conviction for either displaying banned Nazi symbols or denying the Holocaust, the court said.

In 2003, a Mainz court found Mahler guilty of condoning a crime for saying the September 11 attacks in the United States were justified and fined him several thousand euro.