It is the day that Armin Kurtović has been looking forward to, for which he has prepared. The day when he can finally say what happened to him and his family after the death of his son Hamza. His son, just 22 years old, was shot dead on February 19, 2020, just a few hundred meters from his home in Hanau, in a small bar in the neighborhood. About a man who wanted to kill all foreigners and then shot nine young people in Hanau. A racist murder by a conspiracy fanatic. February 19, 2020 was the day that Armin Kurtović’s world fell apart. And in the weeks that followed, his trust in the rule of law broke.
This Monday, Kurtović spoke to the Hanau investigative committee of the Hessian state parliament. Before that he had told what he wanted to tell them. “Please imagine if your child went somewhere with friends in the evening, as they often did, and was shot by a right-wing extremist or some terrorist because your child was in the wrong place at the wrong time. What would you think, what would you do feel if someone insinuates that the search for clarification on the matter is all about the money? ” Because that’s exactly what happened to him. “This has been imputed to us by the state authorities in Hesse.”
What Kurtović tells is tough stuff. It rooted in him how the family was put off by the police for hour after hour while the son was long dead. How they were still cradled in hope, told they had just been grazed by a graze, as the family had phoned the hospitals around Hanau. And how, in the meantime, the son was autopsied without the family’s consent. In the autopsy file it was noted that there was no “person entitled to object” – “and on the night of the crime I sat with the police and begged to see my son,” says Kurtović. At 6:30 in the morning, two police officers read out the list of those “who didn’t make it” without warning. His wife and daughter then collapsed. It wasn’t until six days later that they found out where their son’s body was in the forensic medicine department in Frankfurt.
“Something like that doesn’t just hurt. It’s immoral,” says Kurtović
Kurtović has long directed serious allegations to the Hessian Ministry of the Interior and the police. He does not understand that those responsible in Hessian politics are out to “protect their top people and that they are even ready to openly or covertly attack the victims and their families in order to portray them as untrustworthy”. Kurtović says: “Something like that doesn’t just hurt. Something like that is immoral.” The police must check what went wrong, what cost human life, so that others do not suffer a similar fate. Interior Minister Peter Beuth (CDU) has repeatedly eluded discussions with the victims’ families.
Kurtović is worried that the emergency number of the Hanau police could not be reached that evening. Also that the emergency exit of the bar where his son died could not be opened. That the police’s crime scene work was only superficial. And then the migration officer called and warned that they should not take revenge on the father of the perpetrator, who lives in Hanau. “Are we victims or perpetrators?” Asks Kurtović. He wanted to bring all this to the attention of the members of the committee of inquiry.