They tried everything. The mothers, fathers, siblings of those killed in the racist attack in Hanau had asked the Federal Criminal Police Office to turn every stone again, they had given information about security gaps and omissions. In February 2021, they even filed a complaint against the perpetrator’s father, whom they believe to be the man behind the crime. They were hoping. It is hoped that someone will still be held responsible for the attack by the 43-year-old right-wing extremist conspiracy theorist Tobias R., who roamed Hanau on February 19, 2020 and killed nine people in bars and kiosks whom he believed to be migrants.
It was almost two years ago and many of those left behind were consumed in the struggle for justice. But now the Attorney General has stopped the investigation into the Hanau attack. “There were no sufficient factual indications of instigators, accomplices, assistants or confidants,” says the Federal Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Markus Schmitt. The investigators processed 300 clues and leads and heard more than 400 witnesses. However, they could not find anyone who helped Tobias R. prepare for his deed or who knew about it. Even the perpetrator’s father, whom many took to be the son’s spiritus rector, no longer has anything to fear. The investigations did not reveal anything that the father “was involved in the actual act of the attack in some form of criminal law or knew about it in advance,” explains the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.
Hans-Gerd R., the father, meanwhile 74, had been questioned several times by the Federal Criminal Police Office. However, he did not contribute anything illuminating, says an investigator. The man claims that it was not his son who killed the nine people in the Hanau bars, but some secret services. They also killed his son and his wife. The investigators, on the other hand, assume that Tobias R. returned home after his assassination trip through Hanau and shot his bedridden mother there and then himself.
The relatives and their lawyers see a “dominance and dependency relationship” between father and son and had filed a complaint against him because they saw in him at least one confidante: he had not prevented the act. Several witnesses reported that the son was under his father’s thumb. He has been a troublemaker for years and has fought legal skirmishes with numerous authorities. He was recently convicted of insult. However, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office does not see such a dominance relationship. The son completed his studies, had professional success and lived for several years away from his father in Munich. The father only represented the son in legal and administrative matters.
“Not his father’s willing tool”
The investigators assume that the son planned and prepared the acts independently. He also created his own homepage, on which he spread his racist sentiments to the point of the extermination of entire peoples, and nowhere does his father appear or any reference to him, says an investigator from the SZ. However, the father had requested the release of the racist homepage after the death of the son. The son had also written a farewell letter to the father – that would have been nonsensical if the father had known about the crime, says an investigator. “He wasn’t his father’s willing tool.” Although both had a crude view of the world, according to which secret services ruled the world and they both constantly observed and foreigners took over Germany. But just because the two of them had “to a considerable extent” a similar worldview, “with extremist and conspiracy-theoretical tendencies”, does not yet prove that the father influenced the son or knew about the deed, writes the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in its hiring order.
Guns and considerable amounts of ammunition had been found in the family’s house in Hanau – but they had all been legally acquired from the son, who shot in a rifle club in Munich and also repeatedly went abroad to practice shooting alone. The investigators had checked all the cartridges and weapons for traces of the father – there were none. However, the father had behaved very strangely after the fact: he had not opened the door when the SEK surrounded the house, he made a gesture as if he were aiming his finger at the police officers and he was sneaking around the house and that night shone his flashlight into the son’s vehicle, as if he were looking for something there.
For the federal prosecutor’s office, however, that was not enough to bring charges against the man. If there had been more conclusive evidence of him, another question would also have arisen: To what extent would the father be guilty at all? The man is considered to be psychologically abnormal, even more so than his son.
Armin Kurtovic, who lost his son Hamza in the attack, now says: “I don’t understand why the investigation into the father was stopped. He was just as racist as his son and gave false information about what he was doing in the Tatnacht did. “
Only one more option for the relatives of the victims
The victims’ families see themselves again disappointed by the termination of the investigation – for them it is a long series of disappointments. In the course of the investigation, they had to find out that the emergency number 110 in Hanau had been understaffed for years and could not be reached on the night of the crime. A young man, Vili-Viorel Paun, had followed the perpetrator in his car and dialed the emergency number four times. He didn’t get through. Tobias R. then shot the young man. Many relatives are also upset that the escape route in a bar has been closed for years – the relatives say: on instructions from the police, in order to arrest possible drug traffickers during raids. The police deny it.
Legally, there is not much left for the relatives. The lawyers want to check whether they can initiate a lawsuit in order to force a lawsuit after all. But that has a very vague chance of success.
The victims’ families now only have one option to pursue their wish for further clarification: the investigative committee in the Hessian state parliament. The father of Vili-Viorel Paun, who had to die because of the non-working emergency number, is said to testify there this Friday.