Turkish community in Germany file charges over AfD 'camel drivers' slur

A Turkish group in Germany said Thursday it was taking legal action against a lawmaker of the far-right AfD who defamed the ethnic minority as "camel drivers".

The latest controversy sparked by the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party came as Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım was Thursday due to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on a visit meant to improve frayed relations.

The AfD -- which entered Germany's parliament with almost 13 percent of the vote last September -- often makes headlines with hate speech before usually backing away from the most incendiary comments.

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he condemned extremist politicians who make "ruthlessness and hatred ... their strategy".

In the latest case, a lawmaker in the formerly communist eastern heartland of the party, Andre Poggenburg, Wednesday attacked the Turkish group for its criticism of German plans for a new "homeland" ministry.

He said Germany needed no advice on its culture and history from Turks who he said bore responsibility "for their own genocide", the 1915 killings of Armenians in the World War I-era.

"Are they crazy?" he told several hundred mostly-male AfD supporters in Nentmannsdorf, a village near Dresden.

"These camel drivers should go back to where they belong, far beyond the Bosporus, to their mud huts and multiple wives."

Gökay Sofuoglu, chairman of the Turkish Community in Germany organization, which represents the three-million-strong minority, said it would take legal action under hate speech laws.

Poggenburg, the AfD leader in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, later defended his comments as "pointed political satire".

He claimed the language was acceptable on Ash Wednesday when German politicians of all parties traditionally make gloves-off remarks about each other.

A regional politician of the far-left Die Linke party, Rico Gebhardt, said the comments evoked those of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and were "inexcusable and a shame for a civilized country".

AfD national leader Joerg Meuthen said the racist comments "clearly went too far and should not have been made".

The controversy follows public anger against another AfD member, Peter Boehringer of Bavaria state, after reports of a foul-worded group email in which he had allegedly defamed Merkel as a prostitute.