NUREMBERG, West Germany -- The leader of a neo-Nazi gangalleged to have masterminded the killing of a Jewish publisher and his mistress said Monday he had planned to set up a weapons factory in Lebanon.
Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, whose right-wing, paramilitary Defense Sport Group operated from Lebanon after it was banned in West Germany in 1980, said he planned the factory to produce pistols.
Hoffmann, 46, said the fund-raising idea occurred to him when he found he could not obtain pistols easily in Lebanon for his neo-Nazi group and he thought that there would be a market for the weapons among Arabs there.
'If you had not prevented me, the factory would be working today,' said Hoffmann addressing the public prosecutor.
Hoffmann was arrested in 1981 at the Frankfurt airport after a covert trip back to Germany from the Middle East.
He is accused of ordering the murders in December 1980 in Erlangen of publisher and local Jewish leader Shlomo Lewin, 69, and his mistress Frieda Poeschke, 57.
Hoffmann's girlfriend Franziska Birkmann is accused of being an accessory to the killings, alleged to have been carried out with a machine pistol by a now dead member of Hoffmann's group to 'impress' Hoffmann's Palestinian associates.
The prosecution has alleged that while in Lebanon, Hoffmann's group trained under the protection of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But Hoffmann Monday repeated his denials that the group had any contact with Palestinians.
Hoffmann admitted in testimony a prosecution allegation that he organized the forging of $2 million in Lebanon. But he denied this money-making exercise was launched with PLO help and said that the bulk of the phoney money never found its way into circulation.
