The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) still considers the Hanau attack to be a racist act – BKA President Holger Munch has made this clear after reports of an alleged reassessment.
“The BKA rates the act as clearly right-wing extremist. The crime was based on racist motives, “wrote Munch on Twitter on Tuesday.
Media had reported at the weekend that BKA officials now judge the crime differently. Tobias R. did not go through a typical extreme right-wing radicalization, and racism was not the dominant aspect of his worldview. Rather, he chose his victims to get as much attention as possible for his conspiracy theories about intelligence agencies.
R. had shot nine people with foreign roots on February 19 in Hanau, Hesse. The 43-year-old and his mother were later found dead in their apartment. R. had spread abstruse thoughts on the Internet that raised doubts about his mental state. But he had also expressed racist views.
According to the media reports, the alleged reassessment at the BKA should be based, among other things, on the fact that R. neighbors and acquaintances were not noticed by racist statements. There were also no indications that he had dealt with right-wing ideology or with right-wing terrorists and their actions. The reports had said that the assessment of R. should be included in a final report that is still being worked on.
Munch said: “There is currently no such report. The investigation is ongoing. ” On request, the BKA did not want to comment on Saturday and merely referred the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe. The BKA investigates on their behalf.
Attorney General Peter Frank assumed responsibility for the investigation on the night of the attack and spoke of the “deeply racist sentiment” of the gunman. Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) also chose clear words: “The act in Hanau is clearly a racially motivated terrorist attack.”
The Federal Immigration and Integration Council (BZI) had asked the BKA in an open letter to Munch to revise its assessment before the report was finalized. “Negating racism as the main motive is ignorant, dangerous and inconsiderate, even insulting to the victims and their families,” wrote BZI chairman Memet Kilic.
Some AfD politicians had been confirmed by the reports in their view of the attack. What appeared to be obvious to any critical observer is now apparently also becoming official
found: The perpetrator was not a far-right terrorist, but a mentally ill killer, “said the chairman of the AfD parliamentary group, Alexander Gauland. The Brandenburg AfD leader Andreas Kalbitz demanded that the established parties, who had blamed the AfD for complicity in the crime of this mentally ill individual, should now apologize for this “shabby instrumentalization”. Kalbitz is one of the formative leaders of the “wing”, which had been classified as right-wing extremist by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and had been pushed to “self-dissolution” by the party executive.
