A teenage girl in Germany who claimed “neo-Nazis” cut a swastika into her hip last month may have been lying, police say after two medical examinations suggest she inflicted the wound on herself.

The case made nationwide headlines in November, with the controlled media blindly accepting her story as true as part of their continued smear campaign against German patriots.

The teenager told police she had been attacked by four “far-right youths” in Mittweida (illustration), a small town in the eastern state of Saxony, after she had intervened to try and stop them harassing a six-year-old girl from the former Soviet Union.

She said they had thrown her on the ground and cut the five centimeter (two inch) Nazi symbol into her thigh with what she said was an "object similar to a scalpel."

Police had said last month that they believed her because an initial medical examination concluded that she could not have cut the swastika herself.

But two separate examinations since then have cast doubt on her version of events and the girl is being investigated on suspicion of falsely claiming that a crime occurred, the spokesman for the Chemnitz public prosecutor's office, Bernd Vogel, said. “There are sufficient indications to support that," he said.

Vogel stressed, however, that police were also still pursuing the original line of investigation and looking for the attackers, even though no witnesses had come forward to corroborate the story and one possible suspect had an alibi.

He said the probe so far had also found that the six-year-old girl in question hadn't been present, and could therefore not have been harassed.

Were her claim to be proven wrong, it wouldn't be the first false account of a “neo-Nazi” attack. In December 2002 the 14-year-old daughter of a Cuban man walked into a police station in the town of Guben on Germany's border with Poland and claimed that neo-Nazis had cut a swastika into her cheek. She later admitted that she made up the attack.

In 1994, a wheelchair-bound girl in the eastern town of Halle made the same claim, prompting a demonstration by 10,000 people against “far-right violence” the next day. But she later admitted that she had lied.

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