Halle synagogue shooting

The Halle synagogue shooting (amoklauf in der Synagoge Halle) occurred on 9 October 2019 in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, and continued in nearby Landsberg. After unsuccessfully trying to enter the synagogue in Halle during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the attacker, later identified as 27-year-old Stephan Balliet, fatally shot two people nearby and later injured two others. Federal investigators called the attack far-right and antisemitic terrorism. The federal Public Prosecutor General took over the investigation and declared it to be a "violation of Germany's internal security." Balliet, a German neo-Nazi from Saxony-Anhalt, was charged with two counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder. On 10 November 2019, Balliet confessed to the charges before an investigative judge at the Federal Court of Justice. On 21 December 2020, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention. German authorities said the threat of far-right attacks had increased with the number of extremists and fringe groups increasing by 50 percent in the two years prior to April 2019. Citing interior ministry figures, it was reported that some 12,700 Germans were inclined towards violence, of an estimated 24,000 far-right extremists. In 2018, anti-Semitic crime and hate crime targeting foreigners each increased by almost 20 percent in Germany. The perpetrator of the Halle attack also linked his crime to the June 2019 killing of Walter Lübcke, who was backing Germany's refugee policy. All Jewish facilities in Germany are entitled to state security precautions. The police protection of Jewish facilities is a consequence of the Munich massacre in 1972. It is the responsibility of the Bundesländer, and carried out by the state police forces. Nevertheless, the state police of Saxony-Anhalt was not present and carried out no extra security precautions at the Halle synagogue for Yom Kippur in 2019. Daniel Neumann, director of the state union of Jewish communities in Hesse, said that smaller Jewish congregations do not have the financial resources for advanced security gear, including security doors and CCTV.