Neo-Nazi Leader Gets Suspended Sentence

The leader of Germany's extreme-right NPD party was given a four-month suspended jail sentence on Thursday for inciting violence. Judges in the northeastern town of Stralsund ruled that Udo Voigt's call in a 1998 campaign speech for voters to engage in "armed combat" could be interpreted as incitement to violence against the leaders of the main political parties. Voigt had been cleared by a different court in an earlier trial in 2002 after the videotape of his speech was destroyed in a fire, but federal prosecutors lodged an appeal. The former captain in the German airforce is no stranger to controversy. He was placed under investigation in 2004 for suggesting that the concrete blocks of the new Holocaust memorial in Berlin could be used as the "foundations for a new Reich chancellery." The NPD is the most radical of Germany's handful of far-right parties and caused shockwaves among the country's established parties last year when it scored more than nine percent of the votes in the economically depressed eastern state of Saxony, giving it seats in a regional assembly for the first time since 1968.