German national Lutz Bachmann, founder of the anti-immigration, anti-Islam movement Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of Europe, also known as Pegida will face court trial on Tuesday due to incitement in October 2015.
He was charged after calling refugees "filth" and "cattle" on his Facebook account causing anger among his followers. The court stated that his comments were destabilizing public order and an assault to refugees' dignities.
He will be trialed in Dresden, the bastion and founding city of the movement, and will be under impenetrable security. If he was found guilty he can be sentenced up to five years of imprisonment, according to Business Insider UK report.
The 43 year old Bachmann was already convicted before several times. He was sentenced to three years and eight months in jail in 1998 but run away to South Africa. He was imprisoned for 14 months in Dresden after extraditing him for having an invalid visa. He was also sentenced in 2010 for cocaine possession.
Pegida was established in Dresden in 2014. The group's beginning rallies draw thousands but after the pictures were discovered of Bachmann posing as Adolf Hitler, the number of people attending declined to a few hundred by spring 2015, the International Business Times reports.
Pegida stands for Patriotische Europaeer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West). The group was noticeable in demonstrations in Cologne in January after several complaints of sexual assaults against women on New Year's Eve.
Assail were mostly held responsible by people from North Africa who entered Germany unlawfully or have sought asylum. No trials have taken place connecting suspects from the Cologne assaults, as reported by BBC.
In recent months, there have been endeavors to spread the group to the UK, with Bachmann addressing a few hundred supporters of the Pegida movement at a rally in Birmingham. The group is recognized for organizing mass protests across Germany to protest the deportation of refugees and calls to close borders to Muslim refugees and migrants.
