BERLIN (AFP)---Members of a German neo-Nazi party demonstrated Saturday in Frankfurt against the construction of a mosque in an area which already has two Islamic shrines.

About 200 people marched shouting "Stop the Islamisation of Germany," said Joerg Krebs, a spokesman for the local branch of the NPD, a neo-Nazi party.

"We don’t want a big mosque in Hausen," a Frankfurt quarter, "as there are already two mosques."

The mosque is expected to cost about 10 million euros. Germany is home to some 3.4 million Muslims and there are 159 mosques scattered over the country.

Some 900 people in the city held a counter-demonstration Saturday against the neo-Nazi rally.

The NPD was set by in 1964 by former Nazis and is the most radical of
Germany’s three extreme right groups.

The centre-left government of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder attempted to ban the party in 2002.

But the country’s highest court ruled the next year that the bid was unconstitutional because authorities had infiltrated the NPD leadership.

Earlier this week, several German banks have closed accounts belonging to the NPD party, leading the outfit to consider launching its own financial institution.

The ARD public television television said several independent banks had stopped or planned to stop doing business with the party, which is represented in two state legislatures but not in the federal parliament.

The Federal Association of Savings and Loans said its members should not facilitate the party’s financial dealings by managing accounts for earnings from NPD merchandise with far-right slogans and from a party magazine.

"The Association recommends its banks not to open accounts for radical right-wing groups and to close existing accounts," its spokesman, Kirsten Bradtmoeller, told ARD’s Report Mainz programme.

"We say that every account for a radical rightist group is one too many."

A previous report on the programme on October 8 cited in particular Postbank, a privatised financial institution linked to the postal service, for operating several "brown" accounts.

ARD quoted the group as saying that it had now cut all its financial ties with the party.

On the party’s website, NPD general secretary Peter Marx said that the party would soon have no other choice but to "create its own bank".

He said that an NPD financial institution could manage all the party’s dealings and those of its sympathisers.

"Some investors have already expressed interest," Marx told the centre-left daily Berliner Zeitung.