A look at recent deadly racist attacks in Germany
February 20, 2020
BERLIN (AP) — Authorities suspect that the gunman who killed nine people with migrant backgrounds in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau was motivated by racism.
It is the latest in a long line of far-right attacks in Germany, a country still grappling with its Nazi past.
Here is a look at some of the deadliest incidents:
October 2019: A gunman tries to storm a synagogue in the eastern town of Halle during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. After failing to shoot down the door, the 27-year-old German killed two passers-by. The man, who had expressed anti-Semitic and far-right views, was later arrested by police.
June 2019: Walter Luebcke, a regional lawmaker from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right party, is killed by a suspected neo-Nazi.
July 2016: An 18-year-old man fatally shoots nine people and then himself at a Munich mall. Most of the victims are young people with migrant backgrounds. The suspect, a German with Iranian roots, had expressed right-wing extremist views and obtained his firearm on the darknet.
November 2011: Two members of the far-right group National Socialist Underground die following a botched robbery. Their deaths exposed the existence of the group and its involvement in the killing of ten people between 2000 and 2007. For years, authorities had pursued the theory that the shootings of people mostly with immigrant backgrounds were the result of organized crime rather than far-right extremists. The sole surviving core member of the group and several of its supporters were tried and convicted in 2018.
July 2000: Ten people are injured and an unborn child dies in an explosion of an improvised bomb near a train station in Dusseldorf. Prosecutors suspected a man with links to the far-right scene, but he was acquitted for lack of evidence in 2018.
May 1993, Five women and girls are killed and 14 others are injured in a firebomb attack on a Turkish family’s home in the western city of Solingen. Four neo-Nazis are convicted of murder.
November 1992: A Turkish family’s home in the northern town of Moelln is set on fire. Three women die. Two men are convicted of the attack.