On 19 February last year, Tobias Rathjen walked down a street in the centre of Hanau, a town in Germany close to the city of Frankfurt am Main, and shot Kaloyan Velkov dead. The 43-year-old then approached the Midnight Shisha Bar, where he murdered Fatih Saraçoğlu and Sedat Gürbüz.
Afterwards, Rathjen drove to the nearby suburb of Kesselstadt, evading a local, Vili-Viorel Păun, who had tried to block him with his car. When he confronted Rathjen in a parking lot in the nondescript suburb, Păun too was shot dead. The killer then entered the nearby Arena Bar and Cafe, where he murdered Ferhat Unvar, Mercedes Kierpacz, Gökhan Gültekin, Nesar Hashemi and Hamza Kurtović.
This was Germany’s worst mass shooting in decades. That same month, members of a far-right group were arrested on suspicion of planning attacks on mosques across the country. Less than six months after a gunman had murdered two people at a synagogue in Halle, in eastern Germany, Hanau struck a chord in a country that prides itself on how well it has dealt with its fascist past.
