The founder a far-right pressure group has been convicted for inciting hatred.
Lutz Bachmann, the head of the anti-Islamic Pediga group, was found guilty of a court in Dresden on Tuesday. Dresden is the home of the group whose name stands for “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West”.
Bachmann had been charged in October with inciting hatred after posting a series of comments on Facebook describing refugees as “scum”, “trash” and “cattle”.
He has been fined €9,600 although the prosecution had argued for a seven-month prison sentence.
The prosecutors argued that with the internet legally deemed a public forum, the comments were enough to bring charges of inciting hatred with the potential to disturb public peace.
The 43-year-old denied that he had written the posts, but the court rejected this after watching video footage of a Pegida rally in January 2015 where Bachmann appeared to be defending the Facebook comments, saying he had merely "used words that everyone has used at least once."
Bachmann was previously convicted for drug dealing, theft and assault charges, and in the late 1990s he fled Germany for South Africa to avoid a jail term. He was extradited two years later and served some 14 months behind bars in Germany.
Pegida shot to fame through its weekly street protests in Dresden which by early 2015 were attracting some 25,000 people. Since then, and following Bachmann’s selfie photos posing as Hitler, interest has dwindled with just 3,000 at Monday’s march.
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