Archive/File: fascism/austria reuter.040295a
Last-Modified: 1995/04/02
 
 Austrian neo-Nazi sentenced to 15 years jail
    VIENNA, March 31 (Reuter) - A Vienna court on Friday
 sentenced the son of a far-right politician to 15 years in
 prison for neo-Nazi activities.
    It was the harshest sentence ever handed down in Austria in
 a case of this kind.
    Hans-Joerg Schimanek Junior, 31, a former professional
 soldier in the Austrian army, was found guilty of undermining
 the Austrian state and of working to replace it with a national
 socialist (Nazi) regime.
    Schimanek had pleaded not guilty to the charges, which also
 included organising combat training for neo-Nazi youths, and
 said he would appeal the sentence.
    His father, Hans-Joerg Schimanek, a member of the far-right
 Freedom party in the regional parliament in Lower Austria
 province, attended the trial.
    The Freedom party won nearly a quarter of the national vote
 in a general election in October on a nationalist,
 anti-foreigner platform.
    Freedom leader Joerg Haider denies his party has any links
 with extremists and has condemned a series of bomb attacks aimed
 at foreigners in Austria over the past 15 months.
    Four gypsies were killed in a bomb blast last month in the
 worst such attack in Austria since the end of World War Two.
    Police believe right-wing extremists are responsible for
 those deaths, and for letter bomb attacks in December 1993 and
 October last year.
    The younger Schimanek is a close associate of Gottfried
 Kuessel, who last year began serving an 11-year jail sentence
 stemming from his founding of an extreme right group.

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